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President Trump suffered several legal setbacks in three key states on Friday, stifling many of his latest efforts to use the courts to delay or block the victory of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.
In quick succession, Mr. Trump was defeated in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Michigan, where a Detroit state judge rejected an unusual Republican attempt to stop the certification of the vote in Wayne County pending a audit of the account.
The legal losses came when Mr Biden was declared the winner in Georgia and a day after an agency of the President’s Department of Homeland Security outright contradicted him by declaring that the election “was the safest of the world.” American history ”and that“ no evidence ”voting systems have worked.
On Friday, 16 federal prosecutors responsible for monitoring the elections also directly denied the allegations of widespread fraud, saying in a letter to Attorney General William P. Barr that there was no evidence of substantial irregularities.
In his first public remarks of the week, Mr Trump ignored the developments during an appearance at the rose garden. But he showed a momentary crack in his previously unrelenting insistence that he ultimately be proclaimed the campaign winner, saying at one point, “Whatever happens in the future, who knows, which administration I guess. as time will tell. “
Mr Trump’s bad day at the bar began at dawn when news emerged that attorneys at the Ohio-based law firm Porter Wright Morris & Arthur had abruptly withdrawn from a federal lawsuit they they had sued a few days earlier on his behalf in Pennsylvania. The withdrawal from the cabinet followed internal tensions within the cabinet over his work for Mr. Trump and concerns from some lawyers that Porter Wright was being used to undermine the integrity of the electoral process.
Then shortly after noon, a Trump campaign lawyer effectively dropped his so-called Sharpiegate trial in Arizona. The lawsuit claimed that some ballots for Mr. Trump were spoiled after voters in Maricopa County used Sharpie pens, causing “ink bleeding.” Lawyer Kory Langhofer conceded that there were not enough presidential votes at stake in the case to influence the outcome of the race.
The lawsuit, which stemmed from a viral rumor falsely claiming that Arizona’s voting machines were unable to compile completed Sharpies ballots, was already on the rocks. In a hearing Thursday, Mr Langhofer told the court that the county’s vote count was affected simply by “good faith errors”, not by fraud, as Mr Trump has claimed for days.
“We are not saying that anyone is trying to steal the election,” Langhofer said.
With victories in Arizona and Georgia, Mr. Biden has matched the 306 electoral votes Mr. Trump racked up four years ago. Mr Biden was declared the winner of Arizona’s 11 electoral votes on Thursday night after completing more than 11,000 votes in front of Mr Trump. At the court hearing earlier today, a Maricopa County election official said only 191 presidential votes in the county could have been affected by Mr Langhofer’s prosecution.
At around 2 p.m. on Friday, Michigan State Court Judge Timothy M. Kenny dealt Mr. Trump another blow by denying an emergency petition filed by two Republican election officials who asked him to suspend certification of the vote in Wayne County – home to Detroit – pending an audit of the tally. States must certify the election results – confirming that the voting table was correct – in order to distribute their votes to the Electoral College.
Judge Kenny’s ruling meant that the official completion of the vote in Wayne County – and the broader vote in Michigan – could continue at pace. Some legal scholars have suggested that delaying certification of the vote in key states is part of a Trump campaign’s last resort strategy to launch the election in Republican-led state legislatures.
At a hearing this week in Detroit, lawyers in the city asked Judge Kenny not to delay certification for the sake of the gambit. In his ruling, the judge noted that the audit requested by the two Republican plaintiffs, Cheryl Costantino and Edward McCall, would have been “onerous” and forced the rest of Michigan to wait.
“It would be an exercise in unprecedented judicial activism for this tribunal to stop the certification process,” added Judge Kenny.
In a lawsuit filed last week, Ms Costantino and Mr McCall had made numerous claims of improprieties during the vote count at the TCF Convention Center in Detroit.
They accused some heavily Democratic city election officials of training voters to vote for Mr Biden, that some Republican challengers did not have adequate access to monitor the vote count and that tons of ballots were cast. been incorrectly introduced into the convention. center in the middle of the night.
Lawyers for Detroit and the Michigan Democratic Party had argued in court documents that around 100 Republican candidates had in fact been admitted into the convention center, but that some were not allowed to return after leaving the room once the full room.
Judge Kenny wrote that while he took some of these accusations seriously, some were too general to prove and others were “full of speculation and guesswork.”
He rejected an affidavit by a Republican poll observer accusing the computers at the convention center had been poorly connected to the internet, noting that the observer’s credibility was suspect: before the election, the observer posted on Facebook that Democrats were using the coronavirus crisis. as “a cover for polling day fraud”.
Between the events in Arizona and Michigan, another tribunal, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, inflicted another defeat on the president.
The court upheld Pennsylvania’s three-day extension to the deadline for accepting mail-in ballots, which the Trump campaign has vehemently fought against. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court had previously issued a similar ruling and the US Supreme Court refused to accept Mr. Trump’s attempt to challenge it.
As the president spoke in the rose garden, Marc E. Elias, a lawyer who handled several election cases on behalf of Democrats, written on twitter: “Another Friday afternoon with more good news from the courts.”
That turned out to be two more wins in Pennsylvania.
In one, a Montgomery County joint court rejected the Trump campaign’s request to invalidate a batch of mail-in ballots. In the other, a common Philadelphia County court dismissed the campaign’s appeal to invalidate five more mail-in ballots.
The total number of ballots at stake in the two decisions: 8,927.
Mr. Trump was not ready to give up. he posted on Twitter Friday evening that he would win in Pennsylvania, making a baseless claim about the vote count in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.
The Trump campaign and his proxies still have cases pending before the courts, including one in the Federal District Court in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which closely mirrors the Michigan state case that Judge Kenny brought forward. closed Friday.
Legal action to delay certification of the vote in several counties in Wisconsin was filed Thursday in federal district court in Green Bay. On Tuesday, a federal judge in Williamsport, Pa., Will hear arguments in a lawsuit to discontinue voting certification in several counties in that state.
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