[ad_1]
Pennsylvania’s highest court rejected an order from a lower court that barred the state from certifying dozens of contests from the Nov. 3 election.
In the latest Republican lawsuit to thwart President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in Battlefield State, the state’s Supreme Court unanimously rejected the three-day-old order, saying the lawsuit under -jacent was filed months after the law allowed Pennsylvania’s year to be challenged. – old law on postal voting.
The judges also commented on the trial’s astounding demand that an entire election be overturned retroactively. “They did not claim that even a single mail-in ballot was fraudulently cast or counted,” Judge David Wecht wrote in a concurring opinion.
State Attorney General, Democrat Josh Shapiro, called the court’s decision “another victory for democracy.”
The week-long trial, led by Republican congressman Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania, challenged the state’s postal voting law as unconstitutional.
As a remedy, Kelly and other Republican plaintiffs had sought to either reject the 2.5 million mail-in ballots submitted under the law – most of them by Democrats – or to erase the election results and to order the Republican-controlled legislature to choose Pennsylvania Presidential Voters.
The demand by state lawmakers to choose Pennsylvania’s presidential voters also flies in the face of a nearly century-old state law, which grants the power to choose voters by popular vote in the United States. State, wrote Wecht.
While the two high court Republicans joined the five Democrats in opposing the appeals, they parted ways with the Democrats by suggesting that the underlying allegations of the trial – that the postal voting law of the l State could violate the constitution – deserve consideration.
Commonwealth court judge Patricia McCullough, elected Republican in 2009, on Wednesday ordered the certification of any remaining contests, apparently including contests for Congress, to be suspended.
A day earlier, Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf said he had certified Joe Biden as the winner of the Pennsylvania presidential election. Biden defeated President Donald Trump by more than 80,000 votes in Pennsylvania, a state Trump won in 2016.
Wolf had appealed McCullough’s decision to the state Supreme Court, saying there was no “conceivable justification” for it.
The defeat follows Friday’s decision by a federal appeals court to dismiss a separate challenge to the Pennsylvania outcome and back a district judge who likened the president’s trial to lack of evidence and error to the “monster of Frankenstein ”.
The three-member federal panel unanimously upheld a lower court decision last week to reject arguments made by Trump’s legal team, led by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, that the vote in Pennsylvania was tainted with widespread fraud.
“Free and fair elections are the cornerstone of our democracy. The accusations of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair doesn’t make it that way. Charges require specific allegations, then evidence. We have neither here, ”wrote Judge Stephanos Bibas for the 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals.
The judge denounced as “mind-boggling” a Republican demand to overturn the certification of the vote, adding: “Voters, not lawyers, choose the president. The ballots, not the writs, decide the elections. [The] the campaign’s claims are unfounded. “
The ruling, which was Team Trump’s 38th defeat in nationwide election lawsuits, reaffirmed U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann’s earlier opinion on Giuliani’s complaint, delivered after listening to five hours of argument oral last week. The trial, Brann said, was: “like Frankenstein’s monster … sewn up at random.”
with Associated Press
[ad_2]
Source link