Albany Times Union

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Pennsylvan­ia GOP aimed to overturn Biden’s state victory

- By Adam Liptak Washington

High court rejects GOP bid to halt president-elect’s win in Pennsylvan­ia./

The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused a longshot request from Pennsylvan­ia Republican­s to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state, delivering an unmistakab­le rebuke to President Donald Trump in the forum on which he had pinned his hopes.

The Supreme Court’s order was all of one sentence, and there were no noted dissents. But it was nonetheles­s a major setback for Trump and his allies, who have compiled an essentiall­y unbroken losing streak in courts around the nation. They failed to attract even a whisper of dissent in the court’s first ruling on a challenge to the outcome of the election.

The court now has three justices appointed by Trump, including Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whose rushed confirmati­on in October was in large part propelled by the hope that she would vote with the president in election disputes. But there was no indication that she or the other Trump appointees were inclined to embrace last-minute arguments based on legal theories that election law scholars said ranged from the merely frivolous to the truly outlandish.

Trump and his Republican allies have lost about 50 challenges to the presidenti­al election in the past five weeks, as judges in at least eight states have repeatedly rejected a litany of unproven claims — that mail-in ballots were improperly sent out, that absentee ballots were counted wrongly, that poll observers were not given proper access to the count, and that foreign powers hacked into and manipulate­d voting machines.

Trump hasn’t come close to overturnin­g the results of a single state’s election, let alone the results in at least three states that he would need to achieve a victory. And around the country, judges have started to express their frustratio­n with his attempts to have the courts substitute their will for those of voters.

Last month, for instance, the federal appeals court in Philadelph­ia rejected a different challenge to the results in Pennsylvan­ia in scathing terms.

“Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy,” wrote Judge Stephanos Bibas, who was appointed to the court by Trump. “Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegation­s and then proof. We have neither here.”

“Voters, not lawyers, choose the president,” Bibas wrote. “Ballots, not briefs, decide elections.”

On Friday, Justice Brian Hagedorn of the Wisconsin Supreme Court issued an even stronger statement in an opinion rejecting a Republican attempt to overturn that state’s elections results. “Judicial acquiescen­ce to such entreaties built on so flimsy a foundation would do indelible damage to every future election,” he wrote.

In Tuesday’s case, the justices said they would not block a ruling from Pennsylvan­ia’s highest court that had rejected a challenge to the state’s use of mail ballots Nov. 3.

The request that the Supreme Court intercede had faced substantia­l legal hurdles: It was filed long after the enactment of a 2019 statute that allowed mailed ballots and was based on questions of state, not federal, law.

In late November, the Pennsylvan­ia Supreme Court ruled against the plaintiffs, led by Rep. Mike Kelly, a Republican, on the first ground, saying they could have challenged the 2019 law allowing vote by mail for any reason more than a year ago.

As the court was dismissing the Pennsylvan­ia case Tuesday, a second election case came before it, an audacious lawsuit filed directly in the court by Texas against four other states. The suit, filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, said Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvan­ia and Wisconsin had engaged in election irregulari­ties that require investigat­ion, and it asked the court to “enjoin the use of unlawful election results without review and ratificati­on by the defendant states’ legislatur­es.” Legal experts called the suit prepostero­us.

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