Legal team claims voter fraud, courts finding none

PHILADELPHIA » As they frantically searched for ways to salvage President Donald Trump’s failed reelection bid, his campaign pursued a dizzying game of legal hopscotch across six states that centered on the biggest prize of all: Pennsylvania.

The strategy may have played well in front of television cameras and on talk radio to Trump’s supporters. But it hasn’t worked in court, where judges have uniformly rejected their claims of voter fraud.

In a scathing ruling late Saturday, U. S. District Judge Matthew Brann — a Republican and Federalist Society member in central

Pennsylvania — compared the campaign’s legal arguments to “Frankenstein’s Monster,” concluding that Trump’s team offered only “speculative accusations,” not proof of rampant corruption.

The campaign on Sunday filed notice it would appeal the decision to the 3rd U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals, a day before the state’s 67 counties are set to certify their results and send them to state officials. And they asked Sunday night for an expedited hearing Wednesday as they seek to amend the Pennsylvania lawsuit that Brann dismissed.

Trump’s efforts in Pennsylvania show how far he is willing to push baseless theories of widespread voter fraud, even as the legal doors close on his attempts to have courts deliver him a second term.

The effort is being led by Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, who descended on the state the Saturday after the Nov. 3 election. Summoning reporters to a far- flung corner of Philadelphia on Nov. 7, he held forth at a site that would soon become legendary: Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

Only minutes earlier, news outlets had started calling the presidential contest for Democrat Joe Biden.

Just heating up was Trump’s plan to subvert the election through litigation and howls of fraud. And it would soon spread far beyond Pennsylvania.

“Some of the ballots looked suspicious,” Giuliani, 76, said of the vote count in Philadelphia as he stood behind a chain link fence, next to a sex shop. He maligned the city as being run by a “decrepit Democratic machine.”

“Those mail- in ballots could have been written the day before, by the Democratic Party hacks that were all over the convention center,” Giuliani said. He promised to file a new round of lawsuits.

“This is a very, very strong case,” he asserted.

Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor who specializes in election law, called the Trump lawsuits dangerous.

“It is a sideshow, but it’s a harmful sideshow,” Levitt said. “It’s a toxic sideshow. The continuing baseless, evidence- free claims of alternative facts are actually having an effect on a substantial number of Americans. They are creating the conditions for elections not to work in the future.”

Not a single court has found merit in the core legal claims, but that did not stop Trump’s team from firing off nearly two dozen legal challenges to Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania.

The president’s lawyers fought the three- day grace period for mail- in ballots to arrive. They complained they weren’t being let in to observe the vote count. They said Democratic counties unfairly let voters fix mistakes on their ballot envelopes. Everywhere they turned, they said, they sniffed fraud.

“I felt insidious fraud going on,” Philadelphia poll watcher Lisette Tarragano said when Giuliani called her to the microphone at the landscaping company.

In fact, a Republican runs the city’s election board, and has said his office got death threats as Trump’s rants about the election intensified. No judges ever found any evidence of election fraud in Pennsylvania or any other state where the campaign sued — not in Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada or Georgia.

Instead, Trump lawyers found themselves backpedaling when pressed in court for admissible evidence, or dropping out when they were accused of helping derail the democratic process.

“I am asking you as a member of the bar of this court, are people representing the Donald J. Trump for president ( campaign) … in that room?” U. S. District Judge Paul Diamond asked at an after- hours hearing on Nov. 5, when Republicans asked him to stop the vote count in Philadelphia over their alleged banishment.

“There’s a nonzero number of people in the room,” lawyer Jerome Marcus replied.

The count continued in Philadelphia. The Trump losses kept coming. By Friday, Nov. 6, when a state appeals court rejected a Republican complaint over provisional ballots and a Philadelphia judge refused to throw out 8,300 mail- in ballots they challenged, Biden was up by about 27,000 votes.

Nationally, the race had not yet been called. But it was becoming clear that a Biden win in Pennsylvania, with its 20 electoral votes, was imminent.

When it came, Trump quickly pivoted to litigation.

A U. S. appeals court found Pennsylvania’s threeday extension for mail- in ballots laudatory, given the disruption and mail delays cause by the pandemic. Judges in Michigan and Arizona, finding no evidence of fraud, refused to block the certification of county vote tallies. Law firms representing the campaign started to come under fire and withdrew.

That left Giuliani, who had not argued a case in court for three decades, in charge of the effort to overturn the election.

“You can say a lot at a driveway ( news conference). ... When you go to court, you can’t,” said lawyer Mark Aronchick, who represented election officials in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and elsewhere in several of the Pennsylvania suits. “I don’t really pay attention to the chatter until I see a legal brief.”

On Tuesday, Giuliani asked Brann to hold up the certification of the state’s 6.8 million ballots over two Republican voters whose mail- in ballots were tossed over technical errors.

“I sat dumbfounded listening,” said Aronchick, a seasoned trial lawyer.

“We were ready to argue the one count. Instead, he treated us to an even more expanded version of his Total Landscaping press conference,” Aronchick said. “It didn’t bear any relationship to the actual case.”

Giuliani, admired by some for his tough talk as Manhattan’s top prosecutor and his leadership as New York City’s mayor during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, struggled to answer basic legal questions.

But he waxed on about a supposed conspiracy to rig the state election.

“The best description of this situation is widespread, nationwide voter fraud,” Giuliani argued. Under questioning, though, he acknowledged their complaint no longer included a fraud claim.

And then, news broke in the courtroom that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had rejected the campaign’s appeal over observer access in Philadelphia. It was one of the campaign’s last remaining claims.

Even the dissent crushing.

“The notion that presumptively valid ballots cast by the Pennsylvania electorate would be disregarded based on isolated procedural irregularities that have been redressed ... is misguided,” Chief Justice Thomas G. Saylor wrote for the minority in the 5- 2 decision.

Meanwhile, Biden’s lead in the state has expanded to more than 80,000 votes.

“Our system depends on the possibility that you might lose a fair contest. If that possibility doesn’t exist, you don’t have a democracy,” said Levitt, the law school professor. “There are countries that run like that. It just doesn’t describe America.” was