Courts in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin slapped down flailing GOP challenges to President-elect Joe Biden’s win in each state on Tuesday. Judge Pamela Pepper, a federal jurist in the Badger State, declined to grant an evidentiary hearing to Trump-linked lawyer Sidney Powell’s conspiracy-minded “Kraken” case—leaving the suit’s future in question.
Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court rejected an effort by lame-duck President Trump’s campaign to appeal a lower court ruling on a small batch of mail-in ballots from the Philadelphia suburbs. Previous GOP losses before the Keystone State’s highest bench had whittled the number of postal votes in dispute in Bucks County down to just 69. Unlike Powell, the campaign made no claims of fraud, but simply asserted the envelopes on the absentees lacked required information.
Biden carried Pennsylvania by some 81,000 votes and Wisconsin by more than 20,000.
