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Judge finds fatal flaw in Pennsylvania Trump campaign case
A federal court has dismissed the Trump campaign in Pennsylvania, which challenged President-elect Joe Biden’s presumptive victory in the Commonwealth. In doing so, District Judge Matthew Brann turned down the campaign’s eleventh hour attempt to file a new complaint that would have reinstated the election fraud allegations the Trump campaign had dropped days earlier. (I’ve described the trial here and explained the Trump campaign’s latest effort to amend it here.) Judge Brann’s 37-page opinion sets out various reasons for dismissing the case. Most of them are directed to complaints from two individual complainants – voters who claimed their ballots were improperly discarded. In contrast, the court concluded that the Trump campaign lacked standing to sue, having presented no evidence that President Trump had been harmed in any way by the way the election went. held in Pennsylvania. the fatal flaw in the case is the one that we have repeatedly emphasized: the inadequacy between the alleged damage and the compensation sought; as the judge explained, even if one admitted the dubious premise that the two voters in question were wrongly denied the right to while others were not in the same situation, the corresponding remedy would be to have their votes counted, but that was not the cure they were looking for. Instead, backed by the Trump campaign, the two voters asked the court to prevent Pennsylvania from certifying – on Monday as state law requires – the Commonwealth election result, which Biden allowed to win 83,000 votes. Brann replied:> Banning the certification of election results would not restore the right to vote for individual applicants. That would simply negate over 6.8 million [Pennsylvanians] their right to vote. “Standing is measured on the basis of the theory of harm and the specific remedy sought.” It is not “waived in bulk: a claimant’s remedy must be designed to redress the claimant’s particular harm”. The answer here to invalid ballots is not to invalidate millions of others. [Footnotes omitted.]As we detailed on Friday, the case was in an odd position. By filing its initial complaint on November 9, the Trump campaign claimed widespread electoral fraud, relying primarily on the claim that Republican observers were shameless would be denied a meaningful prospecting opportunity for ballots. But, as Brann notes (and we discussed it here), on November 13, the Federal Court of Appeal for the Third Circuit (which has binding effect on the Brann District Court) issued its opinion in Bognet v. the Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. While not directly related to the campaign’s case, Bognet’s reasoning significantly undermined his claims. The campaign responded by modifying his complaint, narrowing the case down to the narrow claim that voters’ equal rights to protect voters of Trump (and, by extension, campaign rights) had been violated by an allegedly flawed process: Voters stationed in Biden-friendly counties were allowed to remedy flaws in the ballots they submitted, while that voters in Trump-friendly counties were not. Brann dismissed this claim, accepting Pennsylvania’s argument that Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar had encouraged the healing of ballots statewide. So the state government was not at fault if all counties did not take advantage of this opportunity, which is largely irrelevant, however. Even if there had been a violation of voters’ rights, the remedy would be to count their votes. Instead, as the court observed, the plaintiffs seek to remedy the denial of their votes by invalidating the votes of millions more. Rather than asking that their votes be counted, they seek to discredit the scores of other votes, but only for one race [i.e., the presidential race, not the other contests down-ballot]. That is just not the way the Constitution works. [Emphasis added.]Further:> Granting the remedy sought by the Paintiffs would necessarily require the voiding of the ballots of every person who voted in Pennsylvania. Because this Court does not have the power to take away the right to vote, even from one person, to let millions of citizens pass, it cannot grant the remedy sought by the plaintiffs. Brann concluded that the Trump campaign had no standing to bring proceedings for the damage alleged by the two voters, in particular after the Bognet judgment. He specifically rejected the campaign’s two main equal-protection complaints: (1) that its observers were discriminatorily excluded from survey observation, and (2) that the ability of voters to remedying defective ballots was deliberately done in counties the state knew about. In the first case, Brann argued that it was not, as the Trump campaign argued, a question of equal protection. The campaign did not claim that Trump watchers were treated any differently from Biden watchers. On this last point, Brann concluded that the campaign misinterpreted Bush against Gore and, in any event, did not claim that Boockvar’s guidelines on ballot healing differed from county to county. More significantly, Brann has denied the Trump campaign’s delaying attempt to modify his complaint again late last week, in order to reinstate the claims of their original complaint, which they withdrew last weekend. The court ruled that this “would unduly delay the resolution of the issues” given that Monday, November 23 is the deadline for Pennsylvania counties to certify the results of their state government elections – a necessary prelude to the nomination. Voters List In reaction to the ruling, advocates for the Trump campaign released a statement claiming that while they disagreed with the “Obama-appointed judge” ruling, it was in fact a boon to “our strategy of getting to the United States Supreme Court quickly.” It is true that Brann was appointed by former President Barack Obama, but he is a Republican and Federalist Society member sponsored by Republican Senator Pat Toomey – a common situation when the two senators of a state are from different parties. , and an administration must ride on nominations. Trump’s lawyers added that the ruling denied them “the opportunity to present our evidence to an he a ring.” They described it as “censorship” of “50 witnesses” who allegedly said election officials from the State had refused the “independent review” required by Pennsylvania law. This is an apparent reference to the campaign’s claim that its observers did not have a meaningful opportunity to observe the poll, which, according to lawyers, “resulted in 682,777 illegal ballots.” The campaign did not mention that it had dropped that charge in its original complaint. Nor did it allude to the conclusion of Brann says the allegation was not a claim for equal protection under federal law Campaign says it will seek an expedited appeal to Third Circuit – the court that just ruled on the Bognet case , the precedent that seems to have prompted the campaign to withdraw the claims it now seeks to revive. In any event, it is anything but clear that the Supreme Court, which has so far refused to act on Pennsylvania electoral law requests relevant to the 2020 election, would agree to hear the campaign case – even assuming the third circuit grants an expedited call. and, as even the campaign clearly awaits, rules against the campaign.
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