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Trump campaign appeals another ballot case in Pennsylvania

The president has reached out to state House Speaker Bryan Cutler to find out how he can advance his cause in the state for “legal votes,

  • Marc Levy/The Associated Press
Voters wait in line outside the Bucks county government building in Doylestown, Pa., a suburb of Philadelphia, on Monday, Nov. 2, 2020. Some said they received word that their mail-in ballots had problems and needed to be fixed in order to count.

 Mike Catalini / AP Photo

Voters wait in line outside the Bucks county government building in Doylestown, Pa., a suburb of Philadelphia, on Monday, Nov. 2, 2020. Some said they received word that their mail-in ballots had problems and needed to be fixed in order to count.

This story has been updated to include political analysts’ discussion of President Trump’s attempt to get a state legislative leader to help overturn the election results.

(Harrisburg) — President Donald Trump’s campaign continues to press lawsuits over Pennsylvania’s election, appealing another case it lost to the state Supreme Court, this time over fewer than 2,000 ballots in a suburban Philadelphia county.

Meanwhile, nine state Republican lawmakers filed another lawsuit in state courts Monday, citing perceived irregularities or complaints over mail-in voting procedures, and asking the court to prevent Pennsylvania from casting its electoral votes for President-elect Joe Biden. The Electoral College meets Dec. 14.

The moves are among a flurry of activity by Republicans, including in the courts and the state Legislature, to try to deny a victory to Biden in Pennsylvania, mirroring similar efforts in other battleground states where Trump lost.

In recent days, Trump also has reached out to House Speaker Bryan Cutler, R-Lancaster, to find out how he can advance his cause in the state for “legal votes,” Cutler’s spokesman said, as Trump supporters demonstrated outside Cutler’s home and office. Top Republicans have said the Legislature cannot legally override the will of voters and pick presidential electors.

AP Photo/Mary Altaffer

A Luzerne County worker canvases ballots that arrived after closing of voting until Friday at 5 p.m. and postmarked by Nov. 3rd as vote counting in the general election continues, Friday, Nov. 6, 2020, in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.

Analysts say the move is “highly uncommon” but not illegal, in part because the state legislature just doesn’t have the authority to overturn election results.

Bruce Ledewitz, a professor at Duquesne University School of Law, said the calls are an “offense against constitutional democracy” but not a crime.

“If I ask you to do something that is legally impossible, I don’t see there’s any real way to prosecute you for it,” he said.

Some political experts see the calls as the latest in a series of experiments to see if Trump could change the election results, none of which has worked.

Penn State political science professor Ray Block said the continued effort in the face of legal defeats is becoming less about the legitimacy of the election and more about Trump maintaining influence among his base and in the Republican party.

He said there is some good news in the fact that the election system survived the stress test the Trump campaign threw at it.

“So, democracy prevails for one more electoral cycle. That’s good,” Block said. “But what Trump did worked. It clearly worked. I’m waiting for the data to show that a lot of people literally believe that Trump was cheated out of an election.”

Sarah Niebler, a political science professor at Dickinson College, said she’s concerned what this action and other efforts to overturn the election will mean for democratic norms going forward.

“It’s really hard to know whether he’s an anomaly in our presidential system or whether it’s the beginning of a new trend in presidential politics,” she said.

The Trump campaign’s appeal, filed Friday, is one of at least five pending cases in which Trump or Republicans are trying to throw out certain ballots or trying to upend Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania over Trump by more than 80,000 votes.

The Bucks County case involves 1,995 mail-in ballots in which voters failed to handwrite their name, address or date on the outside ballot-return envelope, or enclosed their ballot in an inner unmarked secrecy envelope that became unsealed.

The Trump campaign maintains the ballots should be thrown out under state law, although the state Supreme Court, ruling in separate cases, has refused to do so.

The county election board chose to count the ballots, a decision that was upheld in lower courts. Bucks County’s lawyers contend that Trump’s campaign should not be allowed to appeal and point out that the number of ballots in question are far too few to overturn Biden’s win.

In the U.S. Supreme Court, lawyers for Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, have until Tuesday to respond in a case led by Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly, of northwestern Pennsylvania.

Kelly and the other plaintiffs are asking the high court to block Biden’s victory in the battleground state, throw out the state’s year-old mail-in voting law and all the mail-in ballots cast by voters under that law. Most of the 2.5 million mail-in ballots were cast by Democrats.

The state’s lawyers say justices are highly unlikely to grant it. Even if they did, it would not give Trump the presidency.

John Hansberry operates an extractor at Philadelphia's ballot counting center at the Pennsylvania Convention Center. The machine removes sorted mail-in ballots from their double envelopes. Hansberry is using dummy ballots for this demonstration. No ballots can be legally opened before Election Day.

Emma Lee / WHYY

John Hansberry operates an extractor at Philadelphia’s ballot counting center at the Pennsylvania Convention Center. The machine removes sorted mail-in ballots from their double envelopes. Hansberry is using dummy ballots for this demonstration. No ballots can be legally opened before Election Day.

Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court threw out the case on Nov. 28.

Some claims in the newly filed lawsuit have been settled by state courts. Some claims have been thrown out of court.

It includes an affidavit by a U.S. Postal Service contract truck driver who claims he hauled thousands of filled-out mail-in ballots from Bethpage, N.Y., to Lancaster on Oct. 21, although it’s not clear whether that was unusual or suspicious.

The Postal Service has declined comment, and a spokesperson has said the Postal Service’s Office of Inspector General is looking into the matter.

Election officials say the ballots could have been mailed by voters living out of state, while Pennsylvania’s Department of State, which oversees election administration, said it isn’t possible to inject any ballots – much less tens or hundreds of thousands – into an election without detection.

Only registered voters can apply for and receive a ballot, and must fulfill identification requirements, the department said.

Each return envelope is printed with a bar code unique to the voter to prevent anyone from voting twice, it said.

The lawsuit also includes an affidavit by a Republican ballot watcher in Delaware County, a Democratic-leaning suburb of Philadelphia.

The ballot watcher, Gregory Stenstrom, lodged complaints about perceived violations of chain-of-custody procedures for electronic ballot-scanner drives that he connected to large, unexplained additions of vote totals for Biden.

Still, no state or county election official or prosecutor in Pennsylvania has raised evidence of widespread election fraud in the state.

Given a copy of Stenstrom’s affidavit, Delaware County officials called Stenstrom’s information “fundamentally inaccurate,” saying he misunderstood how electronic drives from ballot-scanners are handled.

In a statement, they said Stenstrom’s allegations rely on the proposition that senior county elections staff who worked for years under Republican county administrations were “working in league with the Democratic Party to engage in a mass fraud.”

“It is simply absurd to propose that after years and years of running elections under Republican administrations in Delaware County, they all suddenly became Democratic fraudsters overnight,” county officials said.

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