Pennsylvania court rejects lawsuit challenging election

Harrisburg, November 29

Pennsylvania’s highest court has thrown out a lower court’s order preventing the state from certifying dozens of contests on its November 3 election ballot in the latest lawsuit filed by Republicans attempting to thwart President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the battleground state.

The state Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, on Saturday threw out the three-day-old order, saying the underlying lawsuit was filed months after the law allowed for challenges to Pennsylvania’s expansive year-old mail-in voting law.

The state’s attorney general, Democrat Josh Shapiro, called the court’s decision “another win for Democracy.”

The week-old lawsuit, led by Republican Mike Kelly of northwestern Pennsylvania, had challenged the state’s mail-in voting law as unconstitutional. As a remedy, Kelly and the other Republican plaintiffs had sought to either throw out the 2.5 million mail-in ballots submitted under the law — most of them by Democrats — or to wipe out the election results and direct the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature to pick Pennsylvania’s presidential electors.

Commonwealth Court Judge Patricia McCullough, elected as a Republican in 2009, had on Wednesday issued the order to halt certification of any remaining contests, including apparently contests for Congress.

A day earlier, Tom Wolf, a Democrat, said he had certified Democrat Joe Biden as the winner of the presidential election in Pennsylvania.

Biden beat President Donald Trump by more than 80,000 votes in Pennsylvania, a state Trump had won in 2016.

Wolf had appealed McCullough’s decision, saying there was no “conceivable justification”. — Agencies

Apex court weighs bid to bar illegal immigrants from census totals

Washington: The Supreme Court on Monday is set to take up President Donald Trump’s unprecedented and contentious effort to exclude illegal immigrants from the population totals used to allocate US House of Representatives districts to states. The challengers to Trump’s July directive include various states, cities and immigrant rights groups. They have argued that Trump’s move could leave several million people uncounted and cause California, Texas and New Jersey to lose House seats. Reuters