TRUMP CAMPAIGN SEES FURTHER COURT LOSSES
Wisconsin Supreme Court declines challenge; Arizona, Pennsylvania judges dismiss suits
The legal losses for President Donald Trump continued Thursday as he and his allies once again hit roadblocks in court on cases seeking to have the election overturned.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to the election results filed by Trump’s campaign, finding that under state law, the campaign should have gone first to a lower-level court.
In Arizona, a judge dismissed a key part of a suit seeking to overturn the election filed by the state’s Republican Party chairwoman.
And in Pennsylvania, where the state Supreme Court had dismissed a Republican lawsuit challenging universal mail voting, the court on Thursday issued a one-sentence order unanimously refusing to stay the dismissal.
Despite the steady stream of legal defeats, Trump and his allies pressed forward with their attempts to open new fronts and roll back President-elect Joe Biden’s win.
A day after Trump delivered a 46-minute video from the White House attacking the integrity of the election, his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani continued his campaign, in which he has been making unsubstantiated allegations about fraud to audiences of Republican state lawmakers.
On Thursday, he was at the Georgia Capitol, where he encouraged GOP legislators to reject Biden’s victory in the popular vote and instead choose electors who will back Trump.
“State law doesn’t in any way prevent you, the legislature, from immediately taking this over and deciding this,” Giuliani said at a state Senate subcommittee hearing.
Ray Smith, legal counsel for Trump in the state, said the campaign will be filing a new lawsuit asking the Fulton County Superior Court for a new election; he urged Georgia legislators to select electors independently.
Meanwhile, in the Pennsylvania case, Trump allies late Thursday formally asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block the state high court’s rejection of their challenge to Act 77, the 2019 law that established universal mail voting there.
In Arizona, Maricopa County Judge Randall Warner dismissed part of a challenge brought by state GOP Chair Kelli Ward, saying she had brought the claim too late.
He held an hours-long hearing Thursday on another piece of her suit, allowing her lawyers to present evidence they claimed shows that the processing of ballots in Maricopa County was so f lawed that the election results — which were certified this week — were either wrong or so uncertain that they should not be allowed to stand.
Ward’s lawyers focused on errors in the duplication of ballots that were damaged or otherwise unreadable by tabulation machines. In such cases, a bipartisan board of election workers looks at the ballot to determine the voter’s intent and fills in a clean ballot accordingly.
Before Thursday’s hearing, Ward’s lawyers were allowed to compare 1,626 duplicated ballots to the originals in the presence of attorneys for Democrats and Secretary of State Katie Hobbs. They found a total of nine errors, an error rate of about 0.5 percent.
In other words, county elections official Scott Jarrett said Thursday, 99.45 percent of the inspected ballots were duplicated properly.
Jarrett said some level of human error is unavoidable. “We’re all people,” he said. “It would be unreasonable to expect there would be no errors.”
Applying the same error rate to the more than 27,000 ballots that were duplicated countywide, Trump would gain a total of 103 votes, Jarrett said.
That is far less than Biden’s margin of victory of 10,457 votes.