A Pennsylvania judge on Wednesday threw out an appeal from President Donald Trump’s campaign challenging a small tranche of ballots—because it made no claims of fraud. Judge Renee Cohn Jubelirer dismissed the campaign’s attempt to toss a number of postal votes for technical reasons because the president’s team had made “absolutely no allegations of any fraud, impropriety, misconduct, or undue influence, that anyone voted who was not eligible to vote, or that the secrecy of the ballots cast was jeopardized.” While Trump himself has made wild and unsubstantiated claims of mass malfeasance in multiple states, his legal team’s arguments in court have mostly focused on obscure technical matters or oft-recanted innuendo about allegedly suspicious activities at vote-counting sites. The major exception to this pattern was Rudolph Giuliani’s failed attempt to stop the Keystone State from certifying President-Elect Joe Biden’s victory.
The case before Jubelirer initially dealt with 2,177 mailed ballots from Bucks County—but the judge noted that precedents recently set by the state Supreme Court resolved disputes over all but 69 of them.
