A Pennsylvania appeals court judge ruled that a lawsuit from a group of GOP lawmakers and candidates challenging the constitutionality of the state’s mail-in voting policy stands a good chance of succeeding.
Pennsylvania Commonwealth Judge Patricia McCullough wrote the opinion on Friday as a part of her assessment in calling for state officials to stop any additional steps toward certifying election results. The central legal argument for the lawsuit hinges on a law passed by the Republican-controlled legislature in 2019 called Act 77.
The act permitted voters to cast their ballots by mail up to 50 days prior to an election without giving an excuse, which was previously required to receive an absentee ballot, and Republicans argue it violates the commonwealth’s constitution.
“Petitioners appear to have established a likelihood to succeed on the merits because petitioners have asserted the Constitution does not provide a mechanism for the legislature to allow for expansion of absentee voting without a constitutional amendment,” McCullough wrote.
She also noted that “petitioners appear to have a viable claim that the mail-in ballot procedures set forth in Act 77 contravene” the state’s constitution.
The judge’s ruling came days after Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf signed off on the certification of President-elect Joe Biden as the winner of his commonwealth and its 20 electoral votes.
The lawsuit was an “extraordinary partisan attack” and blasted it as setting “a new low bar,” Wolf’s press secretary Lyndsay Kensinger told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, adding, “To be clear, Congressman [Mike] Kelly is seeking to disenfranchise the nearly 2.7 million Pennsylvania voters who voted by mail-in ballot in the general election, including over 100,000 of his own constituents.”
Biden has begun the presidential transition and has already started naming Cabinet officials, even though President Trump has not conceded. His campaign and Republican operatives alike are filing election-related lawsuits in battleground states, including Pennsylvania, claiming that widespread fraud and voting irregularities called the results into question.
The lawsuits have overwhelmingly been rejected despite the success in this suit. The same day McCullough provided the positive ruling for the Trump campaign, 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee, rejected the campaign’s bid to challenge the election results while rebuking its argument.
“Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy,” Bibas wrote for the three-judge panel. “Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”
Additionally, more than 20 Republican state lawmakers in Pennsylvania introduced a resolution calling for “the Secretary of the Commonwealth and the Governor to withdraw or vacate the certification of presidential electors and to delay certification of results in other statewide electoral contests voted on at the 2020 General Election.”
Even though the resolution was drawn up, the legislature’s session ends on Monday, and Republican House Speaker Bryan Cutler, who did not co-sponsor this resolution, has not scheduled a time to consider the resolution before the end of the session, according to Penn Live.
