Trump’s Pennsylvania Suit Puts Election in Limbo, Judge Told (1)

President Donald Trump’s bid for a court order blocking Pennsylvania from certifying its election result would imperil the votes of 6.8 million people based on “speculation and conjecture” about voter fraud without any evidence to back it up, the Democratic National Committee told a judge.

“It is telling that despite proclaiming to this court that they were prepared to present hundreds of affidavits and extensive evidence of misconduct, no such evidence can be found anywhere in what is now plaintiffs’ second motion for preliminary injunction,” lawyers for the DNC said in a filing Friday evening in federal court in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.

U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann is simultaneously weighing the Trump campaign’s amended request for an injunction and Pennsylvania’s motion to dismiss the suit, which seeks to block certification unless the state tosses out tens of thousands of ballots that the campaign has claimed might be defective.

The Trump campaign’s request “threatens to throw into limbo the results of the 2020 Presidential Election for the entire country,” the DNC said. “The court should reject plaintiffs’ extraordinary and drastic request, and grant defendants’ motions to dismiss.”

Campaign attorney Rudy Giuliani didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment on the filing.

Read More: Trump Pennsylvania Suit Now Suggests Legislature Pick Winner

Giuliani and other lawyers for the campaign have claimed that the voting procedures in Pennsylvania’s most populous counties were part of a coordinated nationwide Democratic conspiracy to steal the election with millions of fake ballots, corrupt voting machine software and “communist money” from Venezuela and Cuba. No evidence of such a scheme has been provided.

The Trump campaign’s motion “does not even try” to meet the legal standard for an injunction, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s office said in a separate filing Friday on behalf of the state’s Democratic secretary of state, Kathy Boockvar. The injunction can’t be granted because the campaign has not demonstrated that it’s likely to succeed in the case, which is based on a “gripe” about state law, the attorney general’s filing said.

Pennsylvania argues the campaign’s claim of a constitutional Equal Protection violation is doomed to fail because it doesn’t allege that state election officials engaged in discrimination when they allegedly failed to enforce state voting laws uniformly in every county. Trump claims some counties improperly allowed voters to fix minor errors on their mail-in ballots before Election Day.

In Friday’s filing, Boockvar blasted Giuliani’s Thursday motion for the injunction, which argued that Pennsylvania should be ordered to quickly hand over thousands of ballot envelopes for a statistical analysis of errors.

“This simple exercise will determine whether plaintiffs can prove their case -- i.e., that sufficient illegal ballots were counted that changed the election result,” Giuliani said in the filing. “If so, the court should set aside these votes and declare Trump the winner.”

(Updates with filing by Democratic National Committee.)

To contact the reporter on this story:
Erik Larson in New York at elarson4@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net

Peter Jeffrey, Peter Blumberg

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