Trump Team Files Lawsuit To Block PA Election Results

PENNSYLVANIA — President Donald Trump's legal team filed another lawsuit in Pennsylvania on Monday challenging the validity of the 2020 election results, the latest in an ongoing series of attempts to cast doubt on the outcome in swing states around the country after Joe Biden was declared the projected winner of the presidential race.

The suit aims to stop the Pennsylvania Department of State from certifying the final election results.

The lawsuit filed Monday in federal district court includes numerous allegations of illegal operations during the election without providing any hard evidence. Many of the claims have already been surfaced in other suits filed by the Trump campaign over the last week. No hearing date had been scheduled as of Tuesday afternoon.

Here are five things to know about the suit:

1. The Trump campaign claims that Pennsylvania instituted something the Trump team calls a "two-tiered" voting system.

The suit alleges in-person voters were held to scrutiny and security that mail-in voters were not.

"Voters in Pennsylvania were held to different standards simply based on how they chose to cast their ballot, and we believe this two-tiered election system resulted in potentially fraudulent votes being counted without proper verification or oversight, as well as many voters being disenfranchised simply for casting theirs votes in-person," Matt Morgan, a legal representative for the Trump campaign, said in a statement announcing the filing of the suit Monday night.

Specifically, the suit claims that election security measures in place at in-person polling places, such as voter signature checks, are more rigorous than the security measures for mail-in ballots. Even before the election, Trump was suggesting that Democrats planned to "cheat" with mail-in ballots, despite no evidence supporting the allegation that mail-in balloting is less secure.

2. Pennsylvania's Attorney General Josh Shapiro says it is baseless.

"The Trump campaign’s latest filing is another attempt to throw out legal votes — my team and I were already prepared for this," Shapiro, a Democrat who was re-elected, tweeted Monday night. "Sleep tight. We will protect the laws of our Commonwealth and the will of the people."

3. Elections officials across Pennsylvania reported no major issues with the 2020 election.

Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, who is named in the lawsuit, explicitly said Thursday there were no reports of voter fraud around the state on Election Day.

Mail-in ballots took longer to count, and the trickling in of final results in the days following Nov. 3 saw those ballots erase Trump's lead over Biden in Pennsylvania. Biden was declared the winner of Pennsylvania, and the White House, on Saturday morning. Days later, Trump has refused to concede.

That Trump's lead vanished after mail-in ballots were counted came as no surprise, as the vast majority of mail-in voters were Democrats. Nonetheless, Trump suggested this reality itself was fraud: "They are working hard to make up 500,000 vote advantage in Pennsylvania disappear," he said Thursday afternoon on Twitter.

4. The suit reiterates claims that Republican ballot watchers were not allowed access to watch votes being counted. State leaders have roundly rejected that allegation as false; poll watchers were allowed, but the Trump team took issue with the distance at which they could observe.

The suit also resurfaces complaints about "pre-canvassing" of ballots for errors, allowing voters who forgot to include the secrecy envelope with their "naked" mail-in ballot to correct their error. A Republican-appointed judge already gave one lawsuit with this premise a chilly reception before it was withdrawn.

A third oft-repeated complaint from the Trump campaign is the three-day extension granted to Pennsylvania, allowing mail-in ballots to be counted as long as they were received by Friday, Nov. 6. This decision was hotly challenged by state Republican leaders throughout the fall, though the U.S. Supreme Court declined to overturn the ruling allowing the extension.

The lawsuit makes mention of Democrat-run counties as being the culprit for the bulk of these issues, and the suit is filed against the board of elections in seven places: Philadelphia, Montgomery, Allegheny, Chester, Centre, Delaware and Northampton counties. Boockvar is also named.

5. Numerous Republican leaders across the state have condemned the Trump campaign's allegations of fraud. "Very hard to watch," Sen. Pat Toomey said in response to the president's claims.

"I saw the president's speech last night, and it was very hard to watch," Toomey said on the "Today Show" early Friday morning. "The president's allegations of large-scale fraud and theft of the election are just not substantiated."

As of Tuesday, Biden leads Trump by about 45,000 votes in Pennsylvania, according to the Associated Press, almost exactly the same margin as Trump's 44,000 vote victory over Hillary Clinton here in 2016.