Philadelphia Election officials didn’t incorrectly prevent Donald Trump’s campaign from monitoring the mail count, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday, a big blow to the president already. beating Legal efforts.
The decision is important because one of the Trump campaign’s loudest claims since the election is that they were improperly barred from observing the vote count in Philadelphia.
While campaign monitors were always permitted to observe, the expedition claimed that they were too far to count – around 15-18 feet – to make any meaningful observation. I got a court order in the days following Election Day asking Philadelphia officials to allow observers within 6 feet.
But the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned that decision on Tuesday, citing it Pennsylvania The act gives Philadelphia election officials broad discretion to decide rules about observers.
“The Board of Directors did not act in contravention of the law in drafting its regulations governing the appointment of candidate representatives during the pre-screening and voting process, since the election law does not specify minimum standards for the distance to the location of these representatives,” said Judge Barbara Todd, Democrat Wrote The majority of the five have justice.
“We found that the board regulations as applied here were reasonable in that they allowed representatives of the candidates to observe the board as it conducts its activities as stipulated in the election law.”
Even two Republican judges who opposed the majority opinion disagreed with the idea, put forward by the Trump campaign, which states that legitimate votes should be rejected due to improper monitoring practices.
Chief Justice Thomas Saylor wrote: “Without apparent fraud, the notion that the correct votes supposed to be cast in Pennsylvania will be ignored based on the isolated procedural irregularities that have been corrected – thus denying thousands of voters the right to vote – is misleading.” In his dissenting opinion.
Accordingly, to the extent that there is an interest in protecting or legitimizing the will of the Philadelphians who cast their votes while the candidate representatives were unnecessarily tied up in the convention center, I do not see any real problem. ”
Currently, Joe Biden is leading Trump in Pennsylvania by 72,832 votes.
The decision came amid a separate hearing on Tuesday in federal court in Pennsylvania.
Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, used the hearing to call for widespread vote rigging, but did not present any evidence of the long-running challenge. Pennsylvania attorneys have rejected Giuliani’s allegations of fraud and have asked the US county judge hearing the case, Matthew Bran, to dismiss Trump’s case.
Although no judgment has yet been passed, losing the case could potentially destroy Trump’s already distant prospects in altering the election outcome.
The Associated Press contributed to the reports
