Philadelphia election officials did not improperly block Donald Trump’s campaign from observing the counting of mail-in ballots, the Pennsylvania supreme court ruled on Tuesday, a major blow to the president’s already flailing legal efforts.
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The decision is significant because one of the Trump campaign’s loudest claims since the election has been that they were improperly blocked from observing the counting of ballots in Philadelphia.
While campaign observers were always allowed to observe, the campaign alleged they were being kept too far from the counting – about 15-18ft – to make any meaningful observation. It secured a court order in the days after election day requiring Philadelphia officials to let observers within 6ft.
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But the Pennsylvania supreme court reversed that decision on Tuesday, noting that Pennsylvania law gives Philadelphia election officials wide discretion to decide the rules around observers.
“The board did not act contrary to law in fashioning its regulations governing the positioning of candidate representatives during the pre-canvassing and canvassing process, as the election code does not specify minimum distance parameters for the location of such representatives,” justice Barbara Todd, a Democrat, wrote for the five justice majority.
“We find the board’s regulations as applied herein were reasonable in that they allowed candidate representatives to observe the board conducting its activities as prescribed under the election code.”
Even the two Republican justices who dissented from the majority opinion disagreed with the idea, advanced by the Trump campaign, that legitimate votes should be rejected because of improper observation practices.
“Short of demonstrated fraud, the notion that presumptively valid ballots cast by the Pennsylvania electorate would be disregarded based on isolated procedural irregularities that have been redressed – thus disenfranchising potentially thousands of voters – is misguided,” wrote chief justice Thomas Saylor in his dissenting opinion.
“Accordingly, to the degree that there is a concern with protecting or legitimizing the will of the Philadelphians who cast their votes while candidate representatives were unnecessarily restrained at the convention center, I fail to see that there is any real issue.”
Joe Biden currently leads Trump in Pennsylvania by 72,832 votes.
The decision came amid a separate hearing on Tuesday in a Pennsylvania federal court.
Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, used the hearing to claim widespread voting fraud, but offered no evidence in the long-shot challenge. Lawyers for Pennsylvania rejected Giuliani’s fraud allegations and asked the US district judge hearing the case, Matthew Brann, to throw out Trump’s lawsuit.
While a ruling has not yet been issued, a loss in the case would likely doom Trump’s already-remote prospects of altering the election’s outcome.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
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