Trump Campaign Challenges Pennsylvania Votes, Democrats Say No Fraud Is Found
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) - The legal battle over the presidential election in Pennsylvania is ramping up with Republican and Democratic lawyers squaring off in court. The latest results show Biden leading in the state by nearly 48,000 votes, but the president's team continues to say the election is not over.
The Trump campaign is pressing on, trying in court to delay the certification and conduct a review of hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots, saying they have been processed and tabulated in secrecy here and elsewhere.
"There were 682,479 votes cast in just two counties -- Allegheny and Philadelphia -- that should have been observed by people in the polling places that were not," said Trump campaign spokesperson Hogan Gidley.
The suit alleges Pennsylvania created a "two-tiered" system of voting that treated voters differently depending on whether they voted by mail or in-person.
First, they argue elections observers could not properly supervise the processing of mail-in ballots, opening the door to fraud. Secondly, they say Democratically-controlled counties worked outside the law, allowing voters to cure or correct their ballots if they submitted them incorrectly, such as not signing the outside declaration envelop.
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"They only did that in a Democrat county," said Gidley. "They did not do that all over the state which creates serious equal protection under the law violations."
But Democratic lawyer Cliff Levine called the lawsuit flimsy, saying there are no credible allegations of duplicate or forged mail-in ballots, for which voters needed to supply their drivers license number, their address and last four digits of their social security number to obtain.
"There has been no fraud. Not even manifest fraud. There have been no allegations of fraud at all throughout the state. It has been incredibly well run," he said.
Levine said instead of producing evidence of fraud, Republicans are merely hashing over the voting process established by the state legislature and already vetted through the courts.
"Because they have no evidence, they are doing these tangential lawsuits of little substance or value just for the purposes of delay and apparently placating the president of the United States," he said.
Now according to published reports, U.S, Attorney General William Barr has authorized federal prosecutors to investigate irregularities and specific incidents of voter fraud. KDKA's Andy Sheehan contacted the U.S. Attorney's Office here in Pittsburgh which declined comment.
