The Trump campaign sued on Monday to invalidate President-elect Joe Biden’s win in Pennsylvania, rehashing debunked claims casting aspersions on the integrity of the election.
Unlike the other lawsuits before it, Trump is aiming big in this one: he’s asked a judge to prevent state officials from certifying the results of last week’s election, in which Biden currently leads the state by a margin of 45,000 votes.
If a judge denies that request, Trump asked that the state certify the winner, but without ballots that were cast where GOP observers were not present. Trump is also asking that a judge throw out all ballots cast by voters who were able to cure ballots with supposed errors.
It’s a massive request filed in federal court in Harrisburg. While unlikely to succeed, it takes aim at the results in Pennsylvania, in an attempt to invalidate large classes of freely and fairly cast votes.
The losing campaign sued Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, and the boards of elections of seven counties in Pennsylvania, all of which Biden won last week, but asks that the entire state be barred from certifying the results.
Lawyers for the Trump campaign reiterate several narratives about the election that have emerged over the past week, including false allegations that the campaign’s observers were prevented from watching. Some GOP observers themselves discredited that idea, but the lawsuit now claims that “Allegheny and Philadelphia Counties alone received and processed 682,479 mail-in and absentee ballots without review by the political parties and candidates.”
“These are unprecedented numbers in Pennsylvania’s elections history,” the case reads.
The suit comes after President Trump has refused to concede the results of the election, and as senior Republican leaders play along with the charade to preserve the President’s ego, damaged by the loss, and to stoke bogus concerns around voter fraud.
So, with a few exceptions, the Trump campaign has begun to throw its energy behind last-ditch efforts to say that the election was stolen and that the result must be overturned.
The suit also claims that the seven counties illegally gave voters the opportunity to cure ballots with errors
There’s no evidence to support any of these assertions which, the lawsuit says, threaten “the integrity of the 2020 Presidential election.”
Kate Riga contributed to this report.
Read the lawsuit here:
