Even as President Donald Trump’s campaign is waging a well-publicized legal war on the broad rules governing the presidential election in Pennsylvania, its lawyers are engaging in lower-profile but no less important, county-by-county trench battles to disqualify individual votes in Philadelphia and its suburbs over technicalities.
Meanwhile, they are pursuing record numbers of challenges to “provisional” ballots, in some cases for grounds as small as the name of the county being misspelled.
Instead, their filings ask courts and county boards to disenfranchise potentially thousands of legitimate voters in Philadelphia and its suburbs over procedural errors made when filing their ballots.
There is no indication that the votes in question were specifically cast for Joe Biden — in fact, some voters contacted by The Inquirer said they voted for Trump. In the unlikely event that Republicans were to prevail in every ballot appeal they’ve brought before regional courts, the votes in question would still amount to only a fraction of Biden’s roughly 50,000-vote lead in the state as of Wednesday night.
And so far, these smaller-scale challenges have not been met warmly in court.