Voronwë the Faithful wrote:
Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, Judge Matthew Brann dismissed the lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign, that Giuliani took over to such awful affect. A few excerpts from his decision:
Quote:
Plaintiffs ask this Court to disenfranchise almost seven million voters. This Court has been unable to find any case in which a plaintiff has sought such a drastic remedy in the contest of an election, in terms of the sheer volume of votes asked to be invalidated.
One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption, such that this Court would have no option but to regrettably grant the proposed injunctive relief despite the impact it would have on such a large group of citizens. That has not happened. Instead, this Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence.
In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state. Our people, laws, and institutions demand more. At bottom, Plaintiffs have failed to meet their burden to state a claim upon which relief may be granted.
I appreciated the judge's explanation about how Pennysylvania's secretretary of state gave counties the discretion to choose to allow voters whose ballots were deemed invalid the option to "cure" them. Some counties chose to do so. Some counties did not. The Trump campaign found two voters from counties that did not allow this option who had their ballots invalidated. But they didn't sue those counties. They sued other counties (with more Democratic voters) and the secretary of state.
It's also worth emphasizing a point you cite from the judge's argument: instead of those two voters seeking the relief of having sheir votes count, they asked the court to throw out seven million other votes. Or in his words: "Plaintiffs do not ask to level up. Rather, they seek to level down".
(The judge was appointed by Barack Obama, but he's a Republican.)
Pennsylvania's junior senator, Pat Toomey, a Republican, says that with this ruling, Trump has exhausted his options, and so Toomey congratulated Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on winning the election. Perhaps just as importantly, Toomey refers to "the apparent attempt by President Trump to thwart the will of Michigan voters and select an illegitimate slate of electoral college electors."
(However, I've already seen a number of conservatives online claiming that this loss was a necessary step toward getting the case to the Supreme Court. Edit: not just online. Rudy Giuliani says the decision will "help us in our strategy to get expeditiously to the U.S. Supreme Court.")