The presidential campaign of President Donald Trump would seek an expedited appeal after a federal judge in the state of Pennsylvania on Saturday dismissed a lawsuit filed by Trump campaign seeking to block millions of mail-in ballots.
Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and campaign senior legal adviser Jenna Ellis, said in a joint statement that they would seek an expedited appeal to the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals. They said the latest development will help quicken their effort to push the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The lawsuit claimed that some counties in Pennsylvania allowed mail-in voters to fix problems with the ballots by casting provisional ballots, which the campaign said were cast illegally for Democrat Joe Biden.
The ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Brann was made on the grounds that the lawsuit provided "strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence."
"In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state," wrote the judge, who was appointed by former Democratic President Barack Obama.
U.S. media have projected that Biden has won 306 Electoral College votes, surpassing the 270 votes needed to clinch the presidency. The watershed moment came on Nov. 7, when Pennsylvania was called for Biden, who now leads Trump in the state by over 81,000 votes, a margin believed to be insurmountable even if those erroneously cast ballots were excluded.
For Trump campaign, time is ticking away as Pennsylvania is scheduled to certify its election results on Monday, all but certain to grant its 20 Electoral College votes to Biden.
While Biden has claimed victory, Trump launched a slew of litigations challenging the results in states that, in addition to Pennsylvania, also include Michigan, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona. Most of those efforts have either been withdrawn by the campaign itself or rejected by the courts, which cited the lack of proof as the reason. Enditem
