In a sign that President Trump may be running out of options to reverse the results of the 2020 election, his legal team has significantly pulled back from a number of their complaints in a Pennsylvania lawsuit.
On Sunday, attorneys for the president revised their legal complaint regarding whether GOP poll watchers had sufficient access to the ballot-counting process. Instead, the revised lawsuit reads, the campaign’s legal team is focused on whether mail-in ballots were properly handled following their delivery. The amended filing maintains the claim that hundreds of thousands of ballots were counted without GOP poll watchers on hand to monitor.
Attorneys for the state of Pennsylvania sense an approaching victory, with their latest court filing arguing that the Trump campaign’s complaints are so narrow that future court dates may prove unnecessary.
“The Amended Complaint adds no new claims for relief and instead materially narrows the pending allegations to a single claim under the same theory alleged in the original complaint,” attorneys representing Pennsylvania wrote in a brief. “For this reason, although the Secretary does not believe that oral argument is necessary to dispense with Plaintiffs’ allegations and claims, counsel for the Secretary will appear and be prepared for argument as scheduled for Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2020, if the court still intends to hear the argument.”
Initially, the Trump campaign sought to have nearly 700,000 mail-in ballots be thrown out because their validation was not overseen by a GOP-appointed poll watcher. After pushback from both the state of Pennsylvania and the judge ruling on the case, the campaign is now focused on blocking Pennsylvania from certifying a victory for Biden there.
Despite the campaign’s revision, the campaign maintained that numerous irregularities in the ballot-counting process still took place.
“Our lawsuit in Pennsylvania absolutely still makes an issue of the 682,479 mail-in and absentee ballots that were counted in secret,” Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh tweeted Sunday night.
Democrats say that should Trump win on all his claims, something they and many legal analysts say remains unlikely, a total of a few thousand votes at most could be thrown out. As of Monday morning, however, President-elect Joe Biden leads Trump by over 70,000 votes.
The Trump campaign and its allies have faced a number of setbacks in their legal campaigns, with a Pennsylvania judge ruling on Nov. 13 against a challenge to the state’s ballot receipt deadline. That same day, the law firm Porter Wright Morris & Arthur withdrew its representation from the Trump campaign following a pressure campaign from the anti-GOP activist group the Lincoln Project.
