The legal jockeying is part of a concerted strategy in a handful of contested states to try and chip away at results that have increasingly swung in favor of former Vice President Joe Biden in recent days.
While officials with the Trump campaign say they've been fighting in court to protect the integrity of the electoral process, the Biden campaign has written off the barrage of litigation as "noise" attempting to undermine the result of a legitimate election.
At a press conference in front of a landscaping business in northeast Philadelphia on Saturday, meanwhile, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani pledged that more litigation was coming.
Here, Law360 takes a quick look at the biggest cases still being litigated in the Keystone State.
Republican Party of Pennsylvania v. Kathy Boockvar
In a potential appeal pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, the Trump campaign has intervened to ask the justices to throw out a ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court authorizing a three-day extension for receipt of mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day.
The state's high court granted the extension in mid-September after finding that the twin challenges posted by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and delivery delays within the U.S. Postal Service threatened to disenfranchise voters in violation of the Pennsylvania Constitution.
The state's Republican Party asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the decision as it pushed arguments that the ruling usurped the legislature's authority to manage elections and changed the definition of "Election Day."
In a split decision, however, the justices shot down the stay bid, and later denied a subsequent petition asking that the high court consider the appeal on an expedited basis in advance of Election Day.
The court has left open the possibility of taking up the case after Election Day, however, and the Trump campaign on Wednesday filed a motion to intervene in the appeal.
In the meantime, election officials in Pennsylvania have ordered that ballots received after Election Day be segregated and counted separately in order to account for the possibility that they are invalidated by the justices.
Acting on a petition from the Pennsylvania GOP, Justice Samuel Alito issued an order on Friday reinforcing that counties in the state were required to segregate late-arriving ballots, but he refused to bar the votes from being counted.
The case is Republican Party of Pennsylvania v. Boockvar et al., case number 20-542, before the U.S. Supreme Court.
In Re: Canvassing Operation
In a case currently being appealed to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, the Trump campaign won an order on Thursday morning allowing official watchers to move within six feet of where election workers in Philadelphia are canvassing mail-in ballots.
According to the campaign, tables for watchers at the massive canvassing operation in the city's convention center had been set up anywhere between 15 and over 100 feet from where counting was taking place and that, as a result, they did not have a meaningful opportunity to observe what was happening.
A Philadelphia County judge initially rejected the campaign's arguments on Election Day after finding that the city had complied with state law requiring only that watchers be permitted in the room where canvassing was happening.
On appeal, however, Judge Christine Fizzano Cannon with the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court upended the ruling on Thursday morning.
The city's Board of Elections has since asked the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to hear an appeal in the case, and that petition remains pending.
The Trump campaign ended up turning to federal court on Thursday afternoon to enforce the order after alleging their watchers were still not being granted adequate access, but a judge eventually dismissed the bid as he ordered the campaign and city election officials to broker a deal.
Philadelphia election officials said during a press conference on Friday that counting was expected to continue into next week as late-arriving mail-in ballots and provisional ballots are tallied.
In his own press conference on Saturday, Giuliani told reporters that the initial inability of watchers to get closer to the canvassing work suggested that fraudulent ballots may have been cast, but he provided no specific evidence to back up the claim.
Combined with what he said were similar complaints in Pittsburgh, he said he expected a new lawsuit over ballot watching to be filed in the Western District of Pennsylvania.
The cases are In Re: Canvassing Observation, case number 1094 CD 2020, before the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court, and case number 425 EAL 2020, before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
The federal case is Donald J. Trump for President Inc. v. Philadelphia County Board of Elections, case number 2:20-cv-05533, before the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
Joseph Hamm et al. v. Kathy Boockvar
A case brought on behalf of two GOP legislative candidates on Tuesday is challenging the validity of provisional ballots cast after voters were notified that mail-in ballots they'd sent in before Election Day had been voided for procedural defects, including missing signatures or secrecy envelopes.
The two candidates — Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., and statehouse hopeful Joseph Hamm — argued that state election officials had issued illegal guidance to counties that voters could "cure" defects on previously submitted mail-in ballots by reporting to polling places to complete provisional ballots.
The pair argued that allowing voters to be contacted about defects on their mail-in ballots — either by political parties or by the counties themselves — ran afoul of Election Code provisions barring the release of any information about so-called pre-canvassing of ballots.
The challenge came after the state's Department of State issued guidance on Monday instructing county election boards to provide information to party and candidate representatives during pre-canvassing about ballots that had been rejected.
Armed with that information, the challengers said that party and candidate representatives were improperly able to reach out to voters to try and get them to submit provisional ballots at their regular polling places instead.
The challengers argued that the guidance ran counter to a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision from mid-September finding that the Election Code did not provide voters a chance to fix defects on mail-in ballots.
The Department of State, meanwhile, has taken the position that the Supreme Court's decision only said that it wasn't mandatory for counties to provide an opportunity for voters to cure defects.
Following a hearing on Friday morning, a judge in the state's Commonwealth Court declined to rule on the merits of the challenge, instead ordering that provisional ballots that could be affected by the case be set aside for the time being.
The case is Joseph Hamm et al. v. Kathy Boockvar, case number 600 MD 2020, before the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court.
Kathy Barnette v. Kenneth Lawrence
In a similar case, a Republican congressional hopeful has asked a federal judge to toss out a swath of mail-in ballots based on complaints that election officials in a suburban Philadelphia County had improperly reached out to voters to allow them to cure defects.
Kathy Barnette, who mounted an unsuccessful challenge to Rep. Madeline Dean, R-Pa., claimed in a lawsuit filed on Tuesday that Montgomery County's effort to reach out to voters ran afoul of equal protection principles because the procedure was not being followed by other counties in the state.
An attorney for Barnette argued that the issue was akin to that addressed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore
, in which the high court said counties could not adopt their own independent methods for interpreting questionable ballots.Like in the Hamm case, Barnette also argued that the county's efforts ran afoul of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's mid-September decision finding that local election boards were not required to reach out to voters to allow them to cure defects.
At a hearing in the case on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Timothy Savage cast doubt on the claims as he pointed to the overall goal of the state's Election Code.
"Wasn't the legislative intent of the statute we're talking about to enfranchise rather than disenfranchise voters?" he asked.
Barnette withdrew her motion for a temporary restraining order in the case on Thursday citing the similar issues being addressed in the Commonwealth Court case, but her complaint remains pending.
The case is Kathy Barnette et al. v. Kenneth Lawrence et al., case number 2:20-cv-05477, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania
Donald J. Trump for President Inc. v. Kathy Boockvar
The Trump campaign filed suit in Commonwealth Court late Wednesday in a challenge to eleventh-hour guidance from Pennsylvania election officials giving voters an extra three days to submit proof of identification if mail-in ballots end up being challenged on the basis of their identity.
The three-day extension from Nov. 9 to Nov. 12 was meant to correspond with a ruling from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in mid-September that granted a similar three-day extension allowing ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted if received by Friday afternoon.
Under the Nov. 1 guidance from the Pennsylvania Department of State, a deficient ballot submitted at the end of the extended return period on Nov. 6 would have the same six-day window for correction as those submitted by Election Day.
But the Trump administration argued in a complaint late Wednesday that the guidance usurped the authority of the General Assembly, which clearly set the date for ID submission as Nov. 9.
While the merits of the dispute have yet to be addressed, President Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt issued a preliminary injunction Thursday afternoon requiring counties to segregate ballots for which identity verification ends up coming in during the three-day extension pending the outcome of the case.
The case is Donald Trump for President Inc. et al. v. Boockvar et al., case number 602 MD 2020, in the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania.
--Additional reporting by Matthew Santoni. Editing by Emily Kokoll.
Update: This article has been updated with Biden's win, Giuliani's comments and Alito's order.
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