Pennsylvania Republicans Sue in Last-Ditch Effort to Stop Election Certification

While it's been weeks since the presidential election, incumbent President Donald Trump still has yet to concede to former Vice President Joe Biden, the projected winner. Trump has vowed to challenge the outcome of the election in court. According to The Hill, a group of Republicans, including Trump ally Rep. Mike Kelly, filed an emergency lawsuit in order to try to block the certification of the election results in Pennsylvania, a state which Biden reportedly won by more than 80,000 votes. States reportedly have until Dec. 8 to resolve election disputes. The electors will then meet on Dec. 11 in order to formally vote for the next president.

The Hill reported that this emergency petition was filed over the weekend ahead of Monday, the deadline for Pennsylvania counties to certify their voting results. As previously mentioned, one of the plaintiffs is Kelly, a Republican representative from Pennsylvania. The representative has reportedly asked the court to strike down its expanded mail ballot voting policy, which was put into place in 2019 after it was passed by Pennsylvania's Republican-led legislature. Based on an analysis from the Philadelphia Inquirer of the Pennsylvania Department of State's data, Biden won three of every four mail-in-ballot votes cast in the state.

This emergency filing comes after the Trump campaign suffered a loss in federal district court on Saturday. At the time, a judge dismissed the campaign's attempt to invalidate millions of legal votes that were cast in the state. U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann wrote in his opinion that the Trump campaign's claims of widespread voter fraud "strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations" that were "unsupported by evidence." He continued to write, "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. Our people, laws, and institutions demand more." On Sunday, the Trump campaign said that they would appeal Brann's ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit.

On Nov. 7, Biden was projected to be the winner of the presidential election after he was projected to win the state of Pennsylvania, which pushed him over the requisite 270 electoral vote threshold that he needed. Since then, Trump has vowed to challenge the outcome of the election, specifically the outcomes in many of these battleground states. He has also claimed, without any supporting evidence, that there was widespread voter fraud in this election.