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Trump wants the certification of votes halted and the state wants his case dismissed.
Lawyers for President Donald Trump and those representing the Pennsylvania Secretary of State filed harshly worded arguments in the United States District Court on Thursday, each seeking to quickly end the legal battle over state management of the 2020 elections.
“The voters of Pennsylvania have spoken,” Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said in her call to dismiss the Trump case. “The counties are busy completing the compilation of these votes and the secretary is preparing to certify the results. The court should reject the plaintiff’s desperate and unfounded attempt to interfere with this process.
Boockvar’s motion to defeat came as the Trump campaign called on Obama-appointed U.S. District Judge Matthew W. Brann to impose a temporary restraining order “banning the state from certifying general election results of November 3, 2020 “.
The Trump campaign has said it must halt the certification process to give the court time to rule before the state reaches the Dec. 8 deadline to present its results to Congress. They argue that if the vote count continues, the results will be certified before the court can rule.
“Complainants could lose their opportunity for meaningful relief entirely if the vote totals are certified, as it is not clear what remedies would remain after this point,” the Trump campaign lawyers write in their memo.
Biden leads the Pennsylvania vote count with more than 53,500 votes – outside the margin that would allow for a recount.
The competing files arrived in one of the country’s most watched cases as the Trump campaign sought to overturn the 2020 vote results based on unsubstantiated allegations that irregularities and fraud tainted the process. The Trump case calls on the court to invalidate mail-in ballots in the state’s strongly democratic urban jurisdictions on the grounds that state election officials treated mail-in voters differently from those who voted in person .
“Nothing less than the integrity of the 2020 presidential election is at stake in this action,” argued the Trump campaign.
A succession of civil rights and public interest legal groups have lined up to fight the president’s lawsuit, calling it an unfair attempt to deny voters their rights. Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro told ABC News on Thursday that the president was simply trying to cast doubt on the electoral process.
“I can tell you that there is a pattern of behavior which is usually an outrageous assertion, followed by a presidential tweet, sometimes followed by a filing in court, and always dismissed followed by loss for them in court.” , Shapiro said. .
In the Trump campaign filing on Thursday, the focus was much less on fraud than in the initial filings. Rather, the president’s team centered their argument on the claim that poll observers were unable to “meaningfully observe” the tally and therefore 600,000 ballots in Allegheny and Philadelphia counties should be invalid. They said this claim – although it has been widely refuted – calls into question the vote count in all 67 counties, as tens of thousands of technically deficient ballots, which could have been spotted by observers, did not ‘should never have been counted.
Boockvar, on the other hand, argued Thursday that the court should dismiss the case because they say it is made up of widespread grievances, based on guesswork and requires “multiple leaps of logic.” Boockvar’s dossier indicates that claims that the polls have been “overtaken by fraud have already been dismissed as being purely speculative and legally untenable.”
“The complainants’ suggestion that there is a federal constitutional right to due process allowing a political representative to stand a certain number of meters away from government employees to count ballots is not supported by law and would transform the role of the federal judiciary in monitoring state-held elections, ”argued Boockvar’s case.
Boockvar said the Trump campaign’s demand to stop election certification altogether is “substantially disproportionate” to its claims and would result in the deprivation of the vote of “nearly 7 million Pennsylvanians.”
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