Top Pennsylvania court rebuffs Trump campaign’s vote-count observation lawsuit

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Tuesday sided 5-2 against the Trump campaign in a lawsuit alleging that its representatives had been unlawfully deprived of an adequate opportunity to watch the vote count in the Democratic stronghold of Philadelphia.

The defeat was the latest in a series of disappointing rulings for the Trump campaign, whose scattershot legal effort has come nowhere close to overturning President Trump’s electoral loss and has produced none of the systematic fraud that Trump and his allies have baselessly claimed to be the source of President-elect Joe Biden’s projected victory.

The dispute arose after the Trump campaign sued the Philadelphia Board of Elections, seeking more leeway for its vote-count observers at the Philadelphia Convention Center. The campaign argued its watchers had been forced to stand too far away — some 15-18 feet — to effectively carry out their duties.

A state trial court rejected the campaign’s argument. But an intermediate appellate court reversed the lower court, ordering that campaign representatives be allowed to observe the canvassing process within a 6-foot distance.

The Philadelphia board appealed to the state Supreme Court, which ruled in its favor Tuesday.

“In sum, we conclude the board did not act contrary to law in fashioning its regulations governing the positioning of candidate representatives [because] the Election Code does not specify minimum distance parameters for the location of such representatives,” the majority wrote.

Biden leads Trump by more than 73,000 votes in the Keystone State with more than 98 percent of the vote counted.

As of Tuesday evening, the Trump campaign and its allies were still engaged in multiple election-related lawsuits more than a week after Biden was projected to win the race.

Trump and his GOP allies have very little to show for the more than two dozen lawsuits they filed in key battleground states following the election, as state and federal vote-certification deadlines draw near.

With Biden projected to win 306 Electoral College votes, the consensus among legal experts is that his victory is beyond the reach of the courts to overturn.

Updated at 5:05 p.m.