What Donald Trump’s Pennsylvania lawsuit actually says

Donald Trump has launched the first in a wave of lawsuits attempting to overturn election results in close states. Here’s what it says.

Donald Trump and Attorney-General William Barr. Picture: Mandel Ngan/AFP

Donald Trump’s campaign is seeking an emergency injunction to prevent Pennsylvania from certifying any election results, amid as-yet-unsubstantiated allegations of widespread voter fraud in the crucial swing state.

Joe Biden was declared the presumptive winner of the presidential election over the weekend after he took the lead from Mr Trump in Pennsylvania, with its 20 electoral college votes tipping him over magic 270 number.

As of Monday morning the President was trailing Mr Biden by more than 45,000 votes, with that lead expected to grow as counting continues – even as the Trump campaign kicked off a flurry of legal challenges alleging shenanigans by election officials in Democrat-run urban centres like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

In a complaint filed Monday in the US District Court, the Trump campaign sought an emergency order to prevent Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar from certifying the election results.

The lawsuit alleges that some 682,479 mail-in and absentee ballots were received and processed in Allegheny and Philadelphia Counties alone, “without review by the political parties and candidates”.

Mr Trump’s lawyers argue that Pennsylvania election officials ignored legal requirements around mail-in ballots – which made up more than 2.6 million of the around 6.75 million votes – and that Republican observers were prevented from “observing the receipt, review, opening and tabulation” of those ballots.

“Those mail-in ballots are evaluated on an entirely parallel track to those ballots cast in person,” the filing says.

“In a rush to count mail ballots and ensure Democrat Joe Biden is elected, Pennsylvania has created an illegal two-tiered voting system for the 2020 general election, devaluing in-person votes.”

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Joe Biden was declared the winner of the election by US media. Picture: Sarah Silbiger/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The lawsuit says voters who appeared in-person “were required to sign voter registrations, have those signatures checked against voter rolls, vote in a polling place monitored by statutorily authorised poll observers, and have their votes counted in a transparent and verifiable open and observed manner”.

“By contrast, due to the arbitrary, unauthorised and standardless actions of the Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Kathy Boockvar, nearly 2.65 million votes were cast through a ‘mail-in’ process that lacked all of the hallmarks of transparency and verifiability that were present for in-person voters,” it says.

Speaking on conservative cable news channel Newsmax on Monday, former New York Mayor and Mr Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani said Republicans had more than 50 witnesses willing to testify.

“The fake media has for some time said there’s no evidence – we’ve been putting evidence on television every day,” he said.

“In this lawsuit we have over 50 witnesses who will say the vote count, particularly once the election ended that night, and President Trump was ahead by 800,000 votes in Pennsylvania, the count thereafter was unlawful.”

Mr Giuliani said the ballots were “counted behind closed doors, Republicans were not given an opportunity to see any of the mail-in ballots, as required by Pennsylvania law – Pennsylvania law requires that for a mail ballot to be valid, it has to be observed by both sides”.

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A Biden supporter gestures towards Trump supporters in Pennsylvania. Picture: Mark Makela/Getty Images/AFP

“We have 55 Republicans ready to testify that they were uniformly corralled and weren’t able to see a single ballot,” he said. “They saw a lot of activity but no ballots. Every one of those ballots cast that was not examined, it’s an illegal ballot, an unlawful vote.”

Democrats have rejected claims Republican observers were not allowed in counting rooms to observe the process, but Republicans argue they were kept too far away from the actual counting tables to perform any meaningful oversight.

Separately to the Trump campaign’s legal action, Pennsylvania House Republicans tomorrow will “call for a legislative-led audit of the 2020 election and demand election results not be certified, nor electors be seated, until the audit is complete”, The Philadelphia Inquirer reports.

It comes after Pennsylvania House Speaker Bryan Cutler wrote to Governor Tom Wolf on Friday citing concerns about the election process.

Republicans said in a press release than “an audit is needed because of a litany of inconsistencies as a result of court actions and Department of State guidance, including the dismissal of signature requirements for mail-in ballots, certain counties allowing for curative measures, counties not following the United States Supreme Court ruling requiring ballots received after election day to be segregated, and more”.

“The uncertainty surrounding these interventions has cast an unnecessary cloud on the election process,” Mr Cutler wrote in the letter. “That invites our people to question the results, regardless of which candidate or party may prevail.”

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Mail-in ballots continue to be counted in the crucial battleground state. Picture: Chris McGrath/Getty Images/AFP

Earlier on Monday, the top Republican in Congress said Mr Trump was fully entitled to challenge the election results in multiple states, insisting that such scrutiny would not undermine democracy.

“President Trump is 100 per cent within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on the first congressional day of a lame duck presidency, with Mr Trump refusing so far to concede to Mr Biden.

Mr Trump and his team have insisted the race is not over, and multiple Republican lawmakers have urged the president not to concede, even as US networks projected Saturday that Biden won the election with at least 279 electoral votes.

The White House has launched legal challenges in several states where the race was close. If irregularities had occurred of a magnitude that would affect the outcome, “then every single American should want them to be brought to light”, Mr McConnell said.

And if Democrats were confident that the vote was fair, “they should have no reason to fear any extra scrutiny”. “Suffice it to say a few legal inquiries from the president do not exactly spell the end of the republic,” he said. “We respect the rule of law, we trust our institutions.”

Late on Monday, Attorney-General Bill Barr said he has authorised the Department of Justice to pursue investigations into “voting irregularities”.

In a memo to country’s 93 US Attorneys, Mr Barr said he was authorising them to “pursue substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities prior to the certification of elections in your jurisdictions in certain cases, as I have already done in specific instances”.

“Such inquiries and reviews may be conducted if there are clear and apparently credible allegations of irregularities that, if true, could potentially impact the outcome of a federal election in an individual state,” he said.

Mr Barr stressed that “while serious allegations should be handled with great care, specious, speculative, fanciful or far-fetched claims should not be a basis for initiating federal inquiries”.

“Nothing here should be taken as any indication that the Department has concluded that voting irregularities have impacted the outcome of any election,” he said.

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– with AFP