Trump campaign withdraws request to exclude 682,479 Pennsylvania mail-in ballots

The Trump campaign withdrew a major section of its legal complaint Sunday against heavily Democratic counties in Pennsylvania which alleged that 682,479 mail-in ballots were accepted and processed without review by political parties.

The central legal theory behind the lawsuit was that processing some ballots with the proper supervision, but not processing other ballots with the same supervision, violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because some voters’ ballots were subjected to greater scrutiny than others. In its request for relief, the Trump campaign asked for all of these ballots to be excluded from the vote total.

There was no clear indication why the Trump campaign dropped this major allegation from its lawsuit. However, Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit because, according to state lawyers, federal court was not the proper jurisdiction for hearing the case. Furthermore, in a separate proceeding, Republican lawyers acknowledged that certified Republican observers were present for the processing of mail-in ballots. Either one exists as a possibility for why the Trump campaign dropped the allegation in its federal lawsuit.


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