President Donald Trump’s campaign on Wednesday filed a lawsuit in an attempt to stop what they allege is Democrats in Pennsylvania breaking the Help America Vote Act (HAVA).
“While HAVA requires that states ensure certain first-time voters provide identification in order to vote, Secretary Boockvar—three days ago—re-wrote Pennsylvania Election Code to abuse her unilateral executive fiat and move the deadline for absentee and mail-in voters to provide missing proof of identification well past the deadline,” said Trump 2020 deputy campaign manager Justin Clark.
HAVA introduced improvements to the voting system and voter access that were identified following the 2000 election. The voter ID procedure is one of the provisions of the act.
Clark called the Secretary’s late rule change “ridiculous.”
“Without our action, Pennsylvanians, and possibly all Americans, may be forced to wait yet another several days for the outcome of the election,” he said.
With a number of battleground states still in contest due to uncertainty in counting mail-in ballots, Trump was behind Biden in electoral votes on Wednesday. By 5 p.m., Joe Biden had 248 electoral votes and President Trump had 214 with South Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Alaska, and Michigan to still be officially called.
Biden spoke to voters on Wednesday afternoon and said, he was confident he would be “victorious.”
“There will be no blue states and red states when we win, just the United States of America,” Biden said.
Earlier in the day, the Trump team filed a lawsuit against the Michigan count and said it is set to take whatever legal action is needed to get accurate and fair ballot counts in the states that are in question after the campaign was denied “meaningful access to numerous counting locations to observe the opening of ballots and the counting process, as guaranteed by Michigan law.”
“We also demand to review those ballots which are opened and counted while we did not have meaningful access,” the campaign said in a statement.
It said that its observers were forced by Democrat officials to watch the counting process from 25 feet or more away.
At a Trump campaign press conference in Philadelphia, the president’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, said the requests were preventing observers from overseeing the counting process.
“Now, ‘observe’ means to any intelligent person being able to look at it,“ he said. ”The way it’s interpreted by the Democrat crooked machine of Philadelphia is that the observers can be 20 or 30 feet away, never able to see the ballot itself, never able to see if it was properly postmarked, properly addressed, properly signed on the outside—all the things that often lead to disqualification.”
Pennsylvania and Michigan have a combined 36 Electoral College votes at stake. While there has been no official announcement of the winner of the 2020 election, both Trump and Biden have said they are the winner.
