The Trump campaign on Sunday significantly narrowed the scope of its federal lawsuit in Pennsylvania, which initially sought to throw out hundreds of thousands of votes and would have erased President-elect Joe Biden’s current lead in the state if successful.
In an amended court filing, the campaign scrapped allegations that election officials infringed on the Trump campaign’s constitutional rights by denying their observers meaningful access to observe votes being counted in Pennsylvania.
President Trump has claimed that about 680,000 votes in heavily Democratic Philadelphia and Pittsburgh should be invalidated because of the limited access Republican ballot counting observers were afforded.
The campaign’s lawsuit now focuses on what is presumed to be a much smaller number of ballots that the campaign says were improperly “cured,” meaning those who submitted mail ballots were allowed to correct errors on their ballots. Six counties illegally allowed voters to cure their ballots, the lawsuit claims. The number of those ballots is expected to be much less than the 66,000 votes Biden has over Trump in Pennsylvania.
The Trump campaign says the lawsuit still mentions that vote counting was done without Republican poll watchers being able to observe the process. However, it no longer alleges that the campaign’s constitutional rights were violated.
“We are still making the strong argument that 682,479 ballots were counted in secret,” Tim Murtaugh, communications director for the campaign, said in a statement. “Our poll watchers were denied the legal right to meaningful access to vote counting and we still have that claim in our complaint. We have preserved our rights to make these arguments.”
The revised lawsuit also repeats a request for U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Brann to block the certification of Pennsylvania’s election results.
The Trump campaign has launched several legal challenges in key battleground states challenging their election results showing Biden as the projected winner of those states and of the presidential election.
Trump has made allegations of voter fraud through mail ballots and claimed he won the election, although his lawyers have yet to produce evidence of fraud widespread enough to alter the election outcome.