The Pennsylvania decision and Trump's legal prospects

US District Court Judge Matthew Brann ruled on Saturday that Trump’s campaign had failed to demonstrate there had been widespread voting fraud in the vote.

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“This Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations,” Brann wrote.

  alJazeera

Hold up. That should read "without merit and WITH speculative accusations." Judges can't afford to be sloppy.

The lawsuit before Brann was filed on November 9 and had alleged inconsistent treatment by county election officials of mail-in ballots. Some counties notified voters that they could fix minor defects such as missing “secrecy envelopes” while others did not.

“This claim, like Frankenstein’s Monster, has been haphazardly stitched together,” wrote Brann.

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“In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state,” the scathing opinion said. “Our people, laws, and institutions demand more.”

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Marc Elias, a Democratic election lawyer, said Trump and his allies have now lost 34 cases and won only two of them. The Pennsylvania verdict “is what a complete ass-kicking of the president’s legal effort looks like,” Elias, who was involved in the case, wrote on Twitter.

My, how legal discourse has devolved.

“As far as litigation goes, I believe this is the end of the line for them,” said Benjamin Geffen of the Public interest Law Center, who was also involved in the case.

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In the state of Michigan, Republicans wrote to state authorities on Saturday asking them to wait 14 days to certify Biden’s victory to allow for an audit of ballots in Wayne County, which includes the majority-Black city of Detroit. The letter cited allegations of “irregularities” that have not been substantiated. Biden won 154,000 more votes than Trump in Michigan.

That effort faces long odds. A spokesperson for Michigan’s top election authority said state law does not allow for audits before the vote is certified, which is due to take place on Monday. Allegations of widespread fraud have been found to be baseless, the spokesperson said.

Two leading Republican Michigan legislators who came to Washington at Trump’s behest said after meeting him on Friday that they had no information that would change the outcome of the election in the state.

In Wisconsin, an official said poorly trained observers for the Trump campaign were slowing a partial recount by challenging every ballot and raising other objections.

“Observers are disruptive. They are asking question after question, telling the tabulators to stop, stop what they’re doing and that is out of line, that’s not acceptable,” Milwaukee County Clerk George Christenson told reporters.

That's not because they were poorly trained.

A manual recount and audit in Georgia confirmed Biden on Friday as the winner in the southern state, the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Georgia in nearly three decades.

The Trump campaign has two business days to request a recount in Georgia. Trump’s legal team has also said it plans a lawsuit in the state, but has not provided specifics.

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Hundreds of supporters gathered at the statehouse in Atlanta on Saturday, with video posted online showing speakers denouncing the media for calling Biden the election winner, as well as state Republican leaders for certifying the results.

Police in riot gear were deployed to separate them from counterprotesters who gathered nearby.

Even if he’d won the Pennsylvania case, Trump would have needed to win other lawsuits in other states where he’d also asked to delay certification. The campaign peppered battlegrounds states with litigation in the days after the election alleging widespread election fraud without proof, but the majority of those cases have already been dismissed.

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The [Pennsylvania] case was always a long shot to stop President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration, but it was President Donald Trump’s best hope to affect the election results through the courts, mostly because of the number of electoral votes, 20, at stake in Pennsylvania.

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“One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption,” Brann wrote, so much that the court would have no option but to stop the certification even though it would impact so many people. “That has not happened.”

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Brann ruled that Pennsylvania officials can certify election results that currently show Biden winning the state by more than 80,000 votes.

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Giuliani and a Trump campaign lawyer said in a statement that they welcomed the dismissal because it would allow them to appeal up to the U.S. Supreme Court faster, where Trump has repeatedly said he feels he has sympathetic justices. But, the justices heard a case from the state before the election, over a three-day extension on mail-in ballots, and allowed the extension over the objections of the GOP.

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Sen. Pat Toomey, a Pennsylvania Republican who had a hand in placing Brann on the bench during the Obama administration, said the ruling showed Trump had exhausted all possible legal avenues in the state and went on to congratulate Biden on his victory. He called Brann “a longtime conservative Republican whom I know to be a fair and unbiased jurist.”

  Dallas Morning News

Get ready for some nasty Trump tweets, Toomey.

Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor and New York mayor, showed his rustiness during the hearing this week by tripping himself up over the meaning of “opacity,” mistaking the judge for a federal judge in a separate district and provoking an opposing lawyer.

Giuliani repeatedly contended in court that it was illegal for counties to help people vote. Opposing lawyer Mark Aronchick suggested Giuliani must not know the Pennsylvania election code.

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Counties must certify their results to Boockvar by Monday, after which she will make her own certification. Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf will notify the winning candidate’s electors they should appear to vote in the Capitol on Dec. 14.

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Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, tweeted shortly after Brann’s ruling that “another one bites the dust.”

“These claims were meritless from the start and for an audience of one,” Shapiro said in a statement. “The will of the people will prevail. These baseless lawsuits need to end.”

The judge also denied the campaign a motion to file an amended complaint, concluding that it had already done so once before, and that further motions "would unduly delay" the Nov. 23 deadline for Pennsylvania counties to certify their election results.

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Rick Hasen, a law professor at University of California, Irvine who writes about election law, said Brann's decision marks a "dead end" for the Trump campaign.

"The campaign can try to appeal this to the Third Circuit and even to the Supreme Court, but this is such a dog of a case I cannot see any chance of success there, even before the most sympathetic judges," he wrote. "Rudy had truly participated in the worst piece of election litigation I have ever seen, both in terms of the lawyering and the antidemocratic nature of what the lawsuit attempted to do."

  NPR

Which is what they were after. 

Raffi Melkonian (Fifth Circuit appellate attorney) thread on the decision.

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Also...

The ruling.

UPDATE:  As expected.