FEDERAL COURT RULING COULD TORPEDO TRUMP POLL CASES

A federal appeals court ruling may have torpedoed several federal lawsuits that seek to overturn President Donald Trump’s all-but-certified defeat by former Vice President Joe Biden, Krevin McCoy and Dylan Segelbaum reported for USA Today

The US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled that Pennsylvania voters and a congressional candidate could not use certain constitutional arguments to back their claims that some voters were disadvantaged by changes to election rules spurred by the coronavirus pandemic and US Postal System delays. Trump supporters who used similar constitutional arguments in federal lawsuits in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin voluntarily dismissed their claims.

The dismissals came in advance of oral arguments in a federal lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign in Pennsylvania. Trump lawyers narrowed their legal arguments in that case to avoid running afoul of the appeals court ruling. Although the revised complaint still argues 689,472 ballots were improperly processed and counted outside the view of Trump election watchers, it does not seek legal relief specifically on that point. During the hearing, Trump's personal attorney, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, raised the possibility of seeking to invalidate those votes. He claimed local election officials and their ballot processing rules "stole an election, at least in this Commonwealth." When US District Judge Matthew Brann asked whether the complaint alleges particular fraudulent acts, Giuliani answered: "No, your honor." Some election law and constitutional law experts predict that case, too, is in trouble.

“Trump’s legal path to overturn the election results appears 100 percent dead,” Richard Hasen, an election and campaign law expert at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law wrote on his Election Law Blog. “That is a bad sign” for the Pennsylvania case, said Kermit Roosevelt, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in an email. Trump’s efforts to challenge election results, partly based on allegations of ineligible votes and inadequate observer access to ballot counting, have largely failed. In Pennsylvania alone, Trump supporters have filed at least 15 legal challenges in an effort to reclaim the state’s 20 electoral votes, the Associated Press reported. Judges in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin and Nevada, however, have quickly dispatched some of them. A few have been appealed.