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Pennsylvania High Court to Consider Some Trump Ballot Claims

Pennsylvania High Court to Consider Some Trump Ballot Claims

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court said it will consider claims by President Donald Trump’s campaign that around 8,000 Philadelphia mail-in ballots should be disqualified because they weren’t filled out properly.

According to the campaign, the ballots should be tossed because the voters signed but did not further hand-write their names, addresses or dates on the outside of the return envelopes. A Philadelphia court denied the campaign’s request on Friday, noting voters’ names and addresses were already pre-printed on the envelopes and that state election law was ambiguous on what it means to “fill out” ballots.

The state high court said Wednesday it would exercise emergency jurisdiction to determine whether those ballots should be disqualified, absent any allegation of fraud or irregularity.

Though Trump and his allies have publicly claimed that the president’s election defeat was the result of widespread fraud, especially in Democratic-leaning counties, many of their legal challenges do not allege fraud and instead focus on invalidating “defective” ballots cast by eligible voters.

Philadelphia and its suburbs voted heavily in favor of President-elect Joe Biden, contributing to a margin of victory in Pennsylvania of more than 80,000 votes.

The Trump campaign has not had much luck at the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Before the election, the state high court ruled against the campaign’s push to disqualify mail-in ballots that were postmarked before Election Day but arrived up to three days later. On Tuesday, it said Republican poll observers weren’t entitled to stand within a certain distance to monitor ballot-counting for possible fraud.

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