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Luzerne County employees open postal ballots to be counted at the election office in Wilkes-Barre. Pennsylvania’s mail-in ballots are counted at about fifty thousand in total, Luzerne County hopes to finish tonight.
Aimee Dilger | LightRocket | Getty Images
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Monday addressed President Donald Trump’s campaign, another legal loss, by ruling that mail-in ballots in the state’s presidential election can be counted even if a voter does not fill out the envelope completely.
The ruling follows a ruling by a state federal judge who dismissed the campaign’s request to block the certification of votes that should confirm a victory there for President-elect Joe Biden.
The Trump campaign has consistently lost or withdrawn court cases that sought to reverse the votes for Biden.
The state Supreme Court ruling overturned several lawsuits that the Trump campaign had pursued in its efforts to overturn the Pennsylvania presidential election result.
The cases targeted the Philadelphia County Board of Elections, the most populous area in Pennsylvania, which overwhelmingly voted for Biden over Trump.
The campaign’s lawsuits have focused on the less than 9,000 postal and postal ballots that the county election board decided to count despite possible errors on the outer envelopes. The campaign had argued that these errors, which included failing to handwrite a correct name, date or mailing address on the outside of the return ballot envelope, were disqualifying. But the Supreme Court disagreed.
The court also noted that the campaign did not claim that there was any evidence of fraud associated with these ballots.
Outside the courtroom, lawyers and Trump’s surrogates were quick to assert sweeping fraud allegations at the state and national levels. A lawyer, Sidney Powell, has claimed without evidence that an international Communist-linked plot is underway to rig election software against Trump. Powell had indeed been fired from the Trump campaign’s legal team after making the claims, which immediately came under heavy criticism from all sides of the political aisle.
But when they appeared before a judge, some of the same people, like Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani, refused to argue that the voter fraud had been committed.
“Here we conclude that if the failure to include a name, address or handwritten date in the voter declaration on the back of the outer envelope, while constituting technical violations of the electoral code, does not justify the total withdrawal of the right to vote of thousands of Pennsylvania voters, “Judge Christine Donohue wrote in the court judgment.
If the Trump campaign had won the case and invalidated the votes, that would not have been enough to theoretically overcome Biden’s lead of more than 81,000 votes in Pennsylvania – even if all the ballots in question had gone to Biden.
Trump probably now finds himself with the federal affair, which his campaign loss appealed in part, as his last legal move to undo Biden’s election victory in Pennsylvania.
This is the latest news. Please come back for updates.
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