Even though overturning the Keystone State's 20 votes alone would not be enough to undo Biden's victory, Trump's campaign filed a petition to the Supreme Court claiming the state justices' rulings had allowed enough additional votes to be counted to swing the state for Biden. Those rulings, the campaign said, had held that mail-in ballots couldn't be tossed based on signature comparisons, should be counted even if missing handwritten dates or addresses, and couldn't be closely scrutinized or challenged during the counting process, so the average rate of ballots being disqualified dropped statewide to less than 0.28 percent.
"According to public reports, without these protections, the resulting disqualification rate of invalid ballots was anemic — meaning over 110,000 invalid ballots were illegally counted — more than enough to have affected the outcome of the election, where the margin between the two principal candidates for President currently stands at 80,558," the petition said.
The campaign said the state courts' rulings rewrote the election code in violation of the U.S. Constitution's Article II giving that power to the state Legislature. It asked the justices to either order Pennsylvania to redo its certification by counting only the votes that complied with the original requirements, or to have the state's Republican-controlled General Assembly choose who gets the electoral votes.
Although the campaign did not allege any votes were fraudulent, it said the state Supreme Court's rulings "eviscerated" parts of the mail-in voting process allegedly intended to prevent fraud. It also attacked the state's Supreme Court, where the majority of the justices were elected as Democrats, as partisan.
"Few things contribute more to the appearance of fraud than partisan election officials altering statutory requirements designed to protect against fraud," the petition said. "Equally concerning is the appearance that Pennsylvania's elected Supreme Court may have engaged in partisan decision-making designed to favor the Democratic presidential candidate over the Republican."
When the GOP-run Legislature struck a compromise with their Democratic counterparts and Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf to pass Act 77 in 2019, allowing any qualified Pennsylvania voter to vote by mail, the supposed security measures were left alone, the campaign said.
"Those requirements were in place, and complied with, in the delayed June 2020 primary election. But each of them was dispensed with for the general election, not by the Legislature (as required by Article II), but by state and local elections officials, either unilaterally or in conjunction with the state's elected Supreme Court," the petition said.
But the state Supreme Court had ruled Oct. 23 that comparing a ballot's signature to the voter's registration signature was not an explicit requirement of the election law, noting that the rules for military absentee voters or voters with a disability getting assistance with their ballots clearly said those ballots needed signature comparisons, but the general ballots did not. Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar had argued that signature comparisons were unnecessary for mail-in ballots because voters had provided proof of their identity when requesting their ballots.
Pennsylvania's justices also said the law barred challenges of ballots during the counting process, which the campaign connected to another ruling against it in the case involving the campaign's observers and how close they could get to the counting.
Trump and his allies had repeatedly falsely claimed that observers were not allowed into the rooms where the counting took place, but their court cases focused on "meaningful observation" and whether the law said observers had to be close enough to read and verify the ballot information themselves. In Philadelphia, an area had been set up for all the observers but it was far from some of the canvassing tables at the convention center where the ballots were being counted.
Pennsylvania's Supreme Court had ruled Nov. 17 that state law only said observers needed to be in the room, and without the ability to challenge ballots as they were canvassed there was no need for observers to be close enough to read the ballots and signatures as they were being opened or counted.
The campaign also argued that when the state Supreme Court ruled that signed ballots could be counted even if their outer envelope was missing a handwritten date, address or printed name, it had disproportionately benefited Biden.
"Because most Pennsylvania counties completed their canvassing of mail ballots in accord with the statutory requirements ... the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's post-election alteration of those statutory requirements, which affected two large (and heavily Democrat) counties still canvassing their mail ballots, namely, Philadelphia and Allegheny, was therefore not just an Article II violation, but an Equal Protection violation as well," the petition said.
In its Nov. 23 ruling on whether to count ballots with incomplete outer envelopes, the state Supreme Court had noted that the handwritten date and address were redundant — the ballot envelopes were dated upon arrival to ensure that they had come in before the end of Election Day, and had been preprinted with the voter's address — and were therefore not necessary to prevent fraud.
Trump also argued that the issue was not rendered moot by the Electoral College votes, since a dueling slate of Pennsylvania electors for Trump had also "met, cast votes, and transmitted those votes to the president of the Senate," as they had in several other states where Trump was mounting a desperate campaign to overturn the election. The case was therefore ripe up until Inauguration Day, the campaign claimed, and even after that the justices could still make a ruling on whether their Pennsylvania counterparts had overstepped their power.
"This represents the campaign's first independent U.S. Supreme Court filing and seeks relief based on the same constitutional arguments successfully raised in Bush v. Gore," said Trump campaign attorney Rudy Giuliani in a statement Sunday.
State officials scoffed at the suit.
"This is another doomed attempt to change the results of this election. It will not change the results of this election," said Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro in a tweet shortly after the petition was announced. "I'm on it."
The Trump campaign is represented by Bruce S. Marks of Marks & Sokolov LLC and John C. Eastman of the Chapman University School of Law.
Counsel information for Pennsylvania and Boockvar was not immediately available.
The case is Donald J. Trump for President Inc. v. Boockvar in the U.S. Supreme Court. It had not yet been docketed and assigned a case number as of Monday afternoon.
--Editing by Bruce Goldman.
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