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A contingent of the country’s largest public interest and civil rights groups on Tuesday rejected a week-long effort by President Donald Trump to challenge the 2020 election results with unsubstantiated allegations of electoral fraud and a series of lawsuits.
The group filing documents in United States District Court in Pennsylvania included the American Civil Liberties Union, NAACP, League of Women Voters and Common Cause, claiming they represented around 50,000 female voters who voted by mail – a frequent target of Trump’s unsubstantiated attacks on the electoral system.
Benjamin Geffen, an attorney for the Public Interest Law Center, who works with several of the groups, called Trump’s campaign lawsuit to strike down the election an attack on voters.
“This case asks the courts to withdraw their votes,” Geffen said. “That would be the ultimate case of being denied the right to vote. It’s no different than being told you can’t vote in the first place.”
The defendant in the Trump campaign case is Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Kathy Boockvar, who oversaw last week’s election. But Kristen Clarke, chair of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under the Act, said voters must defend themselves as well.
“The plaintiffs are effectively contesting the votes of millions of Pennsylvania voters and we are here to protect the rights of those voters,” Clarke said.
The 86-page complaint filed Monday by the Trump campaign asks the court to ban the state from certifying the election – or at least the more than 680,000 ballots mailed in the Pennsylvania election.
The Trump affair draws up a long list of grievances about the election, but centers its argument largely on the idea that voters in Democratic-leaning counties received more lax scrutiny from election officials than from counties that were democratic. republican tendency.
“While the bedrock of the US election has been transparency, nearly all critical aspects of the November 3, 2020 general election in Pennsylvania were effectively shrouded in secrecy,” the Trump lawsuit alleges.
The lawsuit focuses on mail-in ballots processed in Democratic strongholds in Allegheny and Philadelphia counties. And he argues that Boockvar “created an illegal two-tier voting system” that subjected voters in person to “greater burdens or scrutiny” than those who voted by mail.
This claim – from two different levels of voters – underlies lawsuits that claim the election violated the Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection.
But Geffen, the public interest lawyer, said that argument is undermined by the fact that Pennsylvania has long left it to counties to handle “the details” of holding an election.
“The counties made many independent decisions for many decades regarding the day-to-day operations of the election,” Geffen said. “You don’t need absolute consistency in every detail of the election for it to be a constitutional and fair election.”
Support for these claims includes a series of allegations – some of which have previously been dismissed by the courts and others that rely on hearsay or suspicious sources – and have been condemned by legal experts on both sides.
In a phone call with reporters on Tuesday, Bob Bauer, senior counsel for President-elect Joe Biden, ridiculed the Trump case as an “embarrassment.” Bauer called the federal affair and a host of others filed last week “noise” and “drama,” and added that he was not concerned about the president’s efforts to bring an election challenge to the House. Supreme Court of the United States.
“I don’t know which of these cases they will inflict on the Supreme Court,” Bauer said. “But they won’t win.”
In Tuesday’s filings, civil rights and public interest groups were joined by eight individual voters who joined the case on behalf of those who voted by mail or by mail in the election of 2020, or who voted by provisional ballot or in person after receiving notice. a postal voting error. Several people noted that COVID-19 motivated them to vote by mail, either because of their age or because of underlying conditions.
Kenneth Huston, chairman of the NAACP Pennsylvania chapter, said his organization joined the case because “most of the mail-in votes were cast by African Americans and people of color,” claiming that black Americans would be primarily affected by any pro-Trump move. campaign.
Suzanne Almeida, executive director of Common Cause Pennsylvania, told ABC News her chapter felt compelled to step in.
“We wanted to bring the voters’ point of view,” she said, “because they can get lost in the shuffle”.
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