President Trump’s campaign on Sunday scrapped a major part of its federal lawsuit challenging the election results in Pennsylvania.
Trump’s attorneys filed a revised version of the lawsuit, removing allegations that election officials violated the Trump campaign’s constitutional rights by limiting the ability of their observers to watch votes being counted.Follow the latest on Election 2020
Trump and Rudolph W. Giuliani, his personal attorney, have said repeatedly that more than 600,000 votes in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh should be invalidated because of this issue.
Trump’s pared-down lawsuit now focuses on allegations that Republicans were illegally disadvantaged because some Democratic-leaning counties allowed voters to fix errors on their mail ballots. Counties have said this affected only a small number of votes.
Cliff Levine, an attorney representing the Democratic Party in the case, said on Sunday evening that Trump’s move meant his lawsuit could not possibly change the result.
“Now you’re only talking about a handful of ballots,” Levine said. “They would have absolutely no impact on the total count or on Joe Biden’s win over Donald Trump.”
Kathy Boockvar, Pennsylvania’s Democratic secretary of state, submitted a court filing in response to the Trump campaign’s actions reiterating her request for the judge to dismiss the lawsuit.
The shift comes amid a string of losses in the Trump campaign’s post-election legal effort, which claimed without evidence that voter fraud, irregularities and rule-breaking led to Biden’s victory. The flurry of post-election litigation has affirmed the integrity of the election: Many of the complaints have been tossed, and not a single vote has been invalidated.