In the latest blow to President Trump’s legal contest of the presidential election results, a federal judge in Pennsylvania dismissed a lawsuit filed by voters challenging the state’s ballot receipt deadline.
The ruling, authored by 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge David Brooks Smith, determined that Pennsylvania votes will count under the rules voters were given when they cast their ballots, rejecting a challenge to Pennsylvania’s extended deadline for mail-in ballots.
“We do so with commitment to a proposition indisputable in our democratic process: that the lawfully cast vote of every citizen must count,” said the Friday decision.
Individual citizens lacked standing in the case, according to the ruling, which stated that under Article III, the plaintiffs “have not suffered a concrete, particularized, and non-speculative injury,” necessary to bring the case under the U.S. Constitution.
The decision also agreed with a lower court ruling to deny a last-minute injunction just before Election Day because it would have “upended the status quo.”
Smith, who was appointed to the court by Republican President George W. Bush, was joined on the opinion by Judge Anthony Joseph Scirica, a former GOP member of the Pennsylvania House.
In a tweet, former U.S. Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal called the decision’s use of the Purcell principle, which says that election rules should not be changed at the last minute, “absolutely devastating for Trump’s future litigation efforts.”
Katyal, a Democrat, added, “Coming from this conservative panel, and saying that [federal courts] can’t interfere so close to an election, destroys any hope Trump thought he had. He can try to get SCOTUS to flip it, but very tough.”
The Trump campaign and Republican allies have filed lawsuits in key states across the country as they seek to contest the results of the election.
Trump’s lawyers scored a minor victory in the state on Thursday when a judge ruled that a small subset of ballots would not be counted. Voters who had cast them failed to present identification in time after the secretary of state extended a deadline that the court then revoked.
A law firm representing the Trump campaign in a case to halt the certification of the state’s election results withdrew from the case. Days earlier, the Lincoln Project had called for greater public scrutiny of lawyers representing Trump, posting their contact information online and asking followers to “make them famous.”
President-elect Joe Biden leads Trump by about 60,000 votes in Pennsylvania, after adding roughly 6,000 overnight. Several hundred thousand ballots remain to be counted, according to the state.
