by Spotlight PA Staff
President Donald Trump vowed to challenge Pennsylvania’s election results in court on multiple fronts Wednesday, even as the commonwealth continued its painstaking process of tallying the vote.
Repeating thus far unfounded claims that the Democrats in Pennsylvania were “scheming to disenfranchise and dilute” the GOP vote, his campaign said it planned to file three legal challenges — including one that would seek to temporarily halt vote counting in the state over claims that Republican canvassing monitors had been kept too far away to meaningfully observe the process.
It also said it would join the still lingering case before the U.S. Supreme Court seeking to overturn a lower court order allowing the commonwealth to count mail ballots that arrived after Election Day, as long as they were postmarked by Nov. 3.
“The eyes of the country are on Pennsylvania, but Pennsylvania has kept eyes off the absentee ballot counting process all along, and that must stop today,” the campaign said in a statement.
The third legal challenge outlined by the campaign centered on what the campaign described as a last-minute change to deadlines for first-time voters to provide ID with their absentee and mail-in ballots. The campaign did not say whether it would pursue those cases in state or federal courts. — Jeremy Roebuck of The Philadelphia Inquirer
The months-long political saga that guaranteed a long vote count in Pennsylvania
It didn’t have to be this way in Pennsylvania.
Yes, the state’s universal mail voting law is only a year old. Yes, this is the first general election test. And yes, the coronavirus pandemic caused a tidal wave in mail ballots, with more than 2.5 million cast.
Despite all of that, the delay in results from Pennsylvania — now the focus of an eager nation awaiting the outcome of the presidential election — was not inevitable, but instead the product of a contentious disagreement between state politicians.
For months before the election, county leaders across the state — Democrats and Republicans — pleaded with the GOP-controlled legislature to give them time to process mail ballots before Election Day. That includes verifying ballots, opening them, flattening them for a voting machine, and tabulating them.
But in the end, the legislature did not pass a bill Wolf said he would sign. — Cynthia Fernandez of Spotlight PA
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