- President Donald Trump has appealed directly to the U.S. Supreme Court, asking that three rulings of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on ballot counting be quashed.
- He lost the election to President-elect Joe Biden more than a month ago.
- The Supreme Court has already dismissed the election challenges, and none of the 40 or so electoral proceedings that Trump and his allies have brought have passed.
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President Donald Trump has once again filed a legal challenge against the election he lost more than a month ago, asking the United States Supreme Court to invalidate three Pennsylvania Supreme Court rulings on electoral laws.
Even in the unlikely event that Trump won the case, it doesn’t necessarily mean he would win the state of Pennsylvania. And even if he won the state of Pennsylvania, he wouldn’t win the presidency. President-elect Joe Biden won 306 votes from the electoral college, and if he loses Pennsylvania’s 20, he still has well over the 270 he needs.
The lawsuit, announced Sunday night by the Trump campaign, prompts the U.S. Supreme Court to make three judgments from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court made in October and November this year, all of which involve technical details of how the ballots will be handled in the absence. The Trump campaign lawsuit states that the state’s Supreme Court erred in those rulings and that only the state legislature has the power to change electoral rules.
It is yet another addition to the 40 or so lawsuits that Trump and his allies have filed over the election results. To date they have not won any of them.
The U.S. Supreme Court previously dismissed a lawsuit from Texas and more than a dozen other states, backed by Trump, seeking to challenge election procedures in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Before the presidential election, Pennsylvania Republicans had filed a similar lawsuit over whether the state could count the ballots that had been sent on election day but arrived with the ballots later. A series of state and federal courts decided those ballots would count. The Supreme Court was divided 4-4 on the matter, leaving the decision of the lower court.
With Amy Coney Barrett in the Supreme Court, Republicans – now accompanied by Trump – have again appealed to the Supreme Court, but it hasn’t heard of it yet.