Pennsylvania

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump law firm withdraws from Pennsylvania case challenging election

      by

      [embedded content]
      A major law firm withdrew overnight from a Trump campaign case in Pennsylvania seeking to have mail-in ballots thrown out, in the latest blow to the president’s efforts to challenge the 2020 election result in court.
      The Ohio-based Porter Wright Morris & Arthur firm, which brought a suit on Monday alleging that the use of mail-in ballots had created “an illegal two-tiered voting system” in the state, abruptly withdrew from that case in a memo to the court.
      “Plaintiffs and Porter Wright have reached a mutual agreement that plaintiffs will be best served if Porter Wright withdraws,” the memo said. The lead lawyer in the case, the Pittsburgh-based Ronald L Hicks Jr, did not immediately reply to a request for comment. The news was first reported by the New York Times.
      Separately, lawyers for the Trump campaign withdrew a lawsuit in Arizona, conceding that the case would not move enough votes to change the election result in the state. “Since the close of yesterday’s hearing, the tabulation of votes statewide has rendered unnecessary a judicial ruling as to the presidential electors,” Trump lawyer Kory Langhofer told an Arizona state court, in news first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
      Unlike most lawsuits brought by the Trump campaign, which targeted small pools of votes whose exclusion would not change the election result, the Porter Wright suit in Pennsylvania challenged nearly 2.65m votes that were cast by mail, the majority by Democrats.
      It accused the secretary of the commonwealth, Kathy Boockvar, of “arbitrary and illegal actions” and sought an emergency order prohibiting the certification of the Pennsylvania election result.
      With that lawsuit stalled, certification in Pennsylvania – and the formal election of Joe Biden as president – drew a step closer. By law the state’s result must be certified by 23 November.
      The news came as a coalition of US federal and state officials said they had no evidence that votes were compromised or altered in last week’s presidential election, rejecting unsubstantiated claims of widespread fraud advanced by Trump and many of his supporters.
      The statement from cybersecurity experts trumpeted the 3 November election as the most secure in American history.

      The Trump campaign has been using lawsuits trying to prevent or delay states in which Trump lost from certifying their election results, an essential step to translating state popular-vote results into a national electoral college result.
      Biden has opened up a lead of 5.3m popular votes and counting, and he is on track to win the electoral college 306-232.
      Dozens of lawsuits brought by the Trump campaign in six states to challenge the election result have gained little traction. The campaign has won minor court victories, such as requiring Pennsylvania to set aside ballots received after election day in case they are later ruled invalid.
      But that pool of ballots and others targeted in Trump lawsuits is not large enough to overcome Biden’s lead in Pennsylvania, where he is up almost 60,000 votes and counting, and in other states.
      Porter Wright is representing the Trump campaign and the Republican party in other Pennsylvania lawsuits, including one seeking to throw out mail-in ballots for which missing voter identification information was not provided by 9 November. The disposition of that lawsuit, which Hicks was also leading, is unclear.
      Porter Wright and a second large law firm, the Ohio-based Jones Day, representing Republicans in 2020 election lawsuits have come under pressure for acting as perceived accomplices in Trump’s effort to cancel the election result.
      The legal news site law.com called it a “public relations nightmare” for the firms. At least one lawyer at Porter Wright resigned over the firm’s decision to carry Trump’s lawsuits forward, the NYT reported.
      The Lincoln Project anti-Trump Republican group has attacked the firms on Twitter, asking, “do you believe your law firms should be attempting to overturn the will of the American people?” The group was suspended from Twitter for publishing the names and office contact information of the lawyers.
      While legal actions by the Trump campaign are proceeding in multiple states, more than a dozen cases have been thrown out of court, and there is not a single case in which substantial evidence of election fraud has emerged.
      Instead, Trump lawyers have had to admit to judges that they have no evidence of fraud – in sharp contrast with the message the president is spreading on Twitter.
      In a case in Maricopa county, Arizona, accusing poll workers of misconduct – the case that was withdrawn on Friday afternoon – Trump lawyer Langhofer told a judge that the plaintiffs were “not alleging fraud” or “that anyone is stealing the election” but raising concerns about “good faith errors”.
      In a case in Montgomery county, Pennsylvania, the lawyer Jonathan Goldstein, who has his own law firm, was attempting to have 592 mail-in ballots thrown out because of “irregularities” with the ballots’ outer envelopes.
      A judge pressed Goldstein on whether he was alleging voter fraud.
      “I am asking you a specific question, and I am looking for a specific answer,” the judge said. “Are you claiming that there is any fraud in connection with these 592 disputed ballots?”
      “To my knowledge at present, no,” Goldstein said.
      “Are you claiming that there is any undue or improper influence upon the elector with respect to these 592 ballots?” asked the judge.
      Goldstein replied: “To my knowledge at present, no.” More

    • 213 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Donald Trump has lost the election – yet Trumpland is here to stay | Aditya Chakrabortty

      by

      Perhaps one day Donald Trump will be dragged out of the Oval Office, his tiny fingernails still dug deep into that fat oak desk. But Trumpland, the country that ignored the politicians and the pollsters and the pundits and gave him the White House in 2016, will outlast him; just as it emerged before he even thought of becoming a candidate. And for as long as it is here it will warp politics and destabilise the US.
      I first stumbled upon Trumpland in 2012, a time when it bore no such name and appeared on no maps.
      I was reporting in Pittsburgh that autumn, as Barack Obama crushed Mitt Romney while cruising to a second term as president. The big US broadsheets wrote up the Republicans as if they were an endangered species , while thirtysomethings in DC gazed deep into their spreadsheets or West Wing boxsets and foretold permanent Democratic majorities, gaily handed to them by a rainbow coalition of black, Latino and granola-chewing graduate voters.
      Except I kept meeting people who lived in an alternative country. People like Mike Stout and his family. He’d worked for decades in the local steel mills and had been a fiery union leader. Now he spent every spare hour as a reincarnation of Woody Guthrie, carrying a guitar along with memories of standing in 2009 on Washington’s Mall to watch Obama’s inauguration, his breath freezing in the January air as the first black president was sworn in . “It was like a new world had opened up, just for an afternoon,” said his wife, Steffi.
      But it was their far more subdued daughter, Maura, who troubled me. The steelworks of her dad’s day was long gone, so she’d gone to university and then spent two years hunting for a job. Now the 23-year-old was doing the accounts for a hotel, a non-graduate position paying $14 an hour, which Mike recalled as the same rate he’d earned at the steelworks in 1978 – without, of course, three decades of inflation. Among Maura’s year of about 500 graduates, she counted as one of the lucky ones.
      “I don’t think I’m ever going to earn as much as my parents,” she said. “I don’t think my husband and I will ever have the same life as they did.”
      We were in Pennsylvania, often painted as a land of blue-collar aristocracy and true-blue Democrats. But the political economy that had underpinned those ballot-box majorities was as rusted as an abandoned factory. Instead, Maura saw a political system that had failed her and her generation, in which every new day was worse than yesterday. And while the Stouts were leftwing, they had little in common with the party they supported. In their eyes, their home had been gutted of manufacturing and bilked by foreign trade deals, and appeared nowhere on the Clinton/Obama ideological map.

      Sure enough, four years later Pennsylvania became one of the rustbelt states that won Trump the White House.
      Trumpland is not the same as the old Republican heartlands, even if they overlap. What the dealmaker saw more clearly than the Bushes, the Romneys and the McCains was that there was a new electoral coalition to be forged out of downwardly mobile white voters. “The people that have been ignored, neglected and abandoned,” he called them in Ohio in 2016. “I am your voice.”
      And so he completed the great inversion of American politics: he turned the Republicans into a party whose future is tied to Trumpland. Even Trump’s rivals accept that. This summer, Texas senator Ted Cruz said: “The big lie in politics is that Republicans are the party of the rich and Democrats are the party of the poor. That just ain’t true. Today’s Republican party are Ohio steelworkers, today’s Republican party are single mums waiting tables…”
      Whatever promises Trump made on the threshold of the White House, once inside he spent four years giving billions in tax cuts to rich people and trying to deprive millions of low-paid Americans of decent healthcare. For the poor whites who put him in power, Trump had nothing to offer apart from racism.
      However grossly used by its leader, Trumpland is more than an imagined community. It has its own society and economics and politics ­– and they barely resemble the rest of the US. The 477 large and densely populated counties won by Biden account for 70% of America’s economy, according to new calculations by the Brookings Institute ; Trump’s base of 2,497 counties amount to just 29% (a further 1% is still to be counted). Brookings describes Trumpland as “whiter, less-educated and … situated in the nation’s struggling small towns and rural areas. Prosperity there remains out of reach for many.”
      These people haven’t been left behind so much as cut loose from the US. Between 2010 and 2019, the US created nearly 16m new jobs but only 55,000 of them were suitable for those who left school at 16. Inequality this deep is not just economic, it is social and psychological. It is also lethal.
      Two economists, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, have found that working-age white men and women without degrees are dying of drug overdoses, alcohol-related liver disease and suicide at unprecedented rates . In 2017 alone, they calculated that there were 158,000 of these “deaths of despair” ­– equal to “three fully loaded Boeing 737s falling out of the sky every day for a year”.
      As Case and Deaton point out, African Americans have still harder lives. They die younger, and are less likely to go to college or get a job. Yet over decades their prospects are improving. For poor white Americans, on the other hand, the trends point straight down. The result, according to a new study by Andrew Oswald and former Bank of England rate-setter David Blanchflower, is that middle-aged, white American school leavers are now suffering an epidemic of “extreme mental distress”.
      When you live in a zero-sum economy, in which you always lose while the other guy wins, then you too might subscribe to zero-sum politics – in which the Democrats aren’t just opponents but enemies, and democratic norms are there to be broken. “These people are hurting,” says Blanchflower. “And when you’re hurting you’ll buy what looks like medicine, even if it’s from a snake-oil merchant.”This is where Biden’s kumbaya politics, all his pleas to Americans to join hands and sing, looks laughably hollow. You can’t drain the toxicity of Trumpism without tackling the toxic economics of Trumpland. And for as long as Trumpland exists, it will need a Trump. Even if the 45th president is turfed out, he will carry on issuing edicts and exercising power from the studio set of any TV station that will have him.
      Eight years after meeting Mike Stout, I spoke to him this week. He didn’t have much good news for me. Maura lost her hotel position last year and is now working from home in the pandemic, phoning up people deep in debt and pressing them to repay their loans. His son, Mike, lost his job just a few weeks ago for the second time in five years, and now has no medical insurance while his wife has stage-4 cancer.
      “They’ve been pushed off the shelf straight into the gutter,” he told me. “I don’t see any party out there willing to protect my children’s lives: not Democrat, not Republican.”
      • Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist More

    • 100 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump's longshot election lawsuits: where do things stand?

      by

      Since election day, Donald Trump and other Republicans have filed a smattering of lawsuits in battleground states that have provided cover for Trump and other Republicans to say that the election still remains unresolved.
      Legal experts have noted these suits are meritless, and even if they were successful, would not be enough to overturn the election results. Indeed, judges in several of these lawsuits have already dismissed them, noting the Trump campaign has failed to offer evidence to substantiate allegations of fraud.
      Here’s where some of the key lawsuits stand:
      Pennsylvania
      One of the main rallying cries for Trump and his supporters has been that they were not allowed to observe vote counting in Philadelphia, the overwhelmingly Democratic city that helped Biden carry Pennsylvania.
      That’s not true. The Trump campaign did secure a court order to allow observers to get closer to the vote counting process, but there’s no evidence observers were excluded and Philadelphia had a 24/7 livestream of its counting. When the campaign went to federal court arguing that its observers didn’t have access to vote counting, a campaign lawyer was forced to admit there was a “non-zero” number of campaign observers watching the vote count.
      Pennsylvania Republicans and the Trump campaign are also still pushing the US supreme court to reject mail-in ballots that were postmarked by election day and arrived at election offices by 6 November. Pennsylvania law requires ballots to arrive by the close of polls on election night, but the Pennsylvania supreme court, where Democrats have a majority, pointed to mail delays and the pandemic to justify the extension. Several other states in the US allow ballots to be counted if they arrive after election day but are postmarked before.
      Republicans have been trying to get these ballots rejected since early September, when the Pennsylvania supreme court extended the receipt deadline by three days. The number of late-arriving ballots is thought to be relatively small, so even if the supreme court were to ultimately reject them, it would not be enough to overturn Biden’s lead of nearly 45,000 votes in the state.
      Trump and Republicans have also pursued a number of cases to try and get courts to reject mail-in ballots where voters made a mistake, but have been unsuccessful in all of their suits. Even if Republicans succeeded, it wouldn’t be enough to overturn the results of the race.
      On Monday evening, the Trump campaign filed another lawsuit in federal court offering a new legal theory – Pennsylvania’s election was illegitimate because it had different processes for voting by mail and voting in person. Many legal experts quickly noted the theory was bogus.
      The suit was “inexcusably late”, said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, who noted the differences between in-person and mail-in voting were known for months.
      “The core theory on which it rests – that there’s some kind of right to have all ballots counted through precisely the same procedures – would effectively invalidate mail-in voting not just in Pennsylvania, but nationwide,” he said. “Yet again, it offers no actual evidence of any impropriety or fraud in how Pennsylvania has counted these ballots. It’s just a transparent effort to throw out legal votes – or, at least, to muddy the waters long enough to prevent Pennsylvania from certifying its slate of electors in time.”
      Arizona
      The Trump campaign filed a lawsuit in Arizona on Saturday that seemed to be based on a discredited conspiracy theory that voters who used Sharpie pens to fill out their ballots would not have them counted.
      The campaign’s suit didn’t specifically mention Sharpies, but contained allegations from voters who said they noticed ink had bled through their ballots, which could potentially cause their ballots not to count if the ballot scanners believed they had cast a vote for more than one candidate in a contest, something known as an overvote. The suit says that poll workers failed to avail voters of the opportunity to cast a new ballot when scanners notified them of the issue.
      The Trump campaign submitted affidavits from two voters who said they were not notified of the chance to fix their ballots. A poll watcher submitted an affidavit saying he observed around 80 instances in which voters were given vague or confusing information about the possibility their vote could be rejected. He said he observed about 40 instances in which the poll worker had pressed the button to submit the ballot on behalf of the voter. Biden leads Trump in Arizona by more than 17,000 votes. More

    • 138 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      'It's not over': Trump supporters protest Biden victory in swing states

      by

      As word came on Saturday that the election had been called for Joe Biden, hundreds of supporters of the defeated president began amassing at Pennsylvania’s state capitol building in Harrisburg to protest.It was a split-screen simulcast of America’s intensified political division, as Donald Trump’s defeat was jubilantly celebrated 130 miles east in Philadelphia, and in cities around the country.And just as Trump has refused to accept the outcome, so too have many of the around 70m people who voted for him, claiming instead that his loss was the result of ballot fraud – a baseless assertion promoted by the White House – and media manipulation. “We need to make sure every legal vote is found and to make sure this election is fair,” the Yorktown state representative Mike Jones told a cheering crowd. “If we allow this country to succumb to socialism, it will not because the left overpowered us, it will be because good men and women did nothing.”Many here repeated a belief that the media and big tech had been against Trump since the start, with Biden as something of a ride-along.“The election has been called by the media. The government has not certified the votes, so anything could still happen,” said Mary Wallace, a Harrisburg resident, adding: “I want nothing more than for Donald Trump to have four more years.”Wallace’s words echoed those of the president on Saturday morning, when he said his opponent “has not been certified as the winner of any states, let alone any of the highly contested states headed for mandatory recounts, or states where our campaign has valid and legitimate legal challenges that could determine the ultimate victor.” More

    • 175 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      'I can't stop crying': joyful celebrations erupt in US as Joe Biden beats Trump

      by

      As news broke that Joe Biden had defeated Donald Trump in the race for the White House, cities across the US saw wild celebrations from supporters of the Democratic nominee for president.
      In Philadelphia, the biggest city in Pennsylvania, the state where Biden was born and which sealed his electoral college victory, celebrations erupted outside the convention center where votes were being counted.
      Donna Widmann, a teacher who helped get her students and their families registered to vote, told the Guardian she had not been able to stop crying.

      “I remember four years ago, watching, you know, on 21 January 2017, him getting inaugurated,” she said, referring to Trump’s installation as the 45th president after his shock victory over Hillary Clinton. “And just crying … just watching [Barack] Obama leave and just crying. I feel like so much, so much emotion has happened in the past four years, man, and it just feels really good – like I can’t stop crying.”
      Windmann, who was holding a sign saying Trump should “take the L”, said she was “psyched” for her students and her families to know they made a difference.
      Alice Sukhina, who is from Ukraine, said she had volunteered for the Biden campaign. She had not been able to see her family in four years, she said, adding that she had sent them messages saying that the wait would soon be over.
      “I am overwhelmed with happiness,” she said. “I’m just so ready to get some real progressive things done. I’m ready to push the platform of Democrats to the left.”
      Marissa Babnew said she was “utterly excited for the first time in a very long time” and added: “I’ve had a lot of close experiences with this pandemic because of my work, and I’m finally feeling hopeful.”
      In Manhattan, where Trump made his fortune in real estate but where he remains a highly controversial and deeply divisive figure, crowds flocked to public spaces including Washington Square Park.
      Uptown, in Washington Heights, two friends, both actors, celebrated in Bennett Park, the sight of a key battle in the American revolutionary war.

      “Our long national nightmare is over,” said Paul DeBoy, happily quoting Gerald Ford’s famous message to the nation after the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974.
      Ward Duffy said the cheering out of apartment block windows, banging of pots and pans, and cars honking in the streets represented “a different celebration than this summer’s respectful salutes to frontline workers” during the coronavirus pandemic.
      “This had a visceral explosion of relief and joy,” he said.
      Cheering, honking and banging of pots and pans erupted in Harlem too. More

    • 175 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      CNN's Van Jones brought to tears as Joe Biden wins US election – video

      by

      Political commentator Van Jones cried as CNN called the US election for Joe Biden. Jones said: ‘It’s easier to be a parent this morning … to tell your kids character matters’.
      Joe Biden won the presidency by clinching Pennsylvania and its 20 electoral votes. With Biden’s victory, Kamala Harris becomes the first woman and the first person of color to become the vice-president
      The path to Joe Biden’s victory: five days in five minutes – video highlights
      US election updates – live More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Philadelphia mayor tells Trump to accept he lost – video

      by

      Jim Kenney tells a press conference that Donald Trump should ‘put his big boy pants on’, acknowledge his defeat and congratulate Joe Biden as the winner of the US presidential election. It could take several days to complete the count in Philadelphia, but Biden has so far won 81% of the votes. Around 40,000 are still to be counted. Trump has continued to tweet baseless allegations of voter fraud
      US election live: Biden on brink of beating Trump with growing lead in Nevada and Pennsylvania
      Trump v Biden – full results as they come in More

    • 175 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Biden takes lead in Pennsylvania and Georgia as he inches closer to beating Trump

      by

      Joe Biden, the US Democratic presidential challenger, has reached what appears to be a tipping point in the contest for the White House, taking the lead in Pennsylvania and Georgia as the tally of postal ballots continued to skew heavily in the Democrat’s favour.
      With a Biden victory looking assured, CNN reported that a “national defence airspace” would be established above the Democratic candidate’s house in Wilmington, Delaware, meaning he would begin to receive the protection of the US military, the first trappings of the presidency.
      But a smooth transfer of power still looked far from certain. Donald Trump and a handful of loyalists continued to allege election fraud, without any evidence. Biden was reported to be seeking to rally prominent figures from both parties to endorse the legitimacy of the election, at a nervous moment for US democracy.
      After whittling down a substantial lead for Donald Trump in Pennsylvania on election night, Biden’s vote count passed the president just before 9am, building up a narrow edge of 6,737. Many of the roughly 130,000 votes yet to be counted in the state are in Democratic areas, and Democrats make up a disproportional share of postal ballots.
      Winning Pennsylvania would also win the presidency, no matter what happens in the other states remaining undecided, but Biden also had the advantage there.
      In the early hours of Friday morning in the US, Biden had moved to a 1,096-vote advantage in Georgia with thousands of ballots still left to be counted – many in counties where the former vice-president was in the lead.
      The Georgia secretary of state reported late on Thursday there were about 10,000 ballots still to be counted in the state, a must-win for Trump in order to keep any chances of re-election alive in the race for the 270 electoral college votes that will determine the presidency.
      Biden’s lead over Trump in the nationwide popular vote stretched to over 4m, as he amassed a record 73.7m, but the president’s tally of 69.7m was the second highest in US political history – reflecting the fact that while Trump seemed doomed to defeat, Trumpism will remain very much a force.
      As Biden closed in on victory on Thursday night, he urged calm after an inflammatory and falsehood-filled Trump address from the White House where the president once again claimed he had won.
      The latest voting figures accelerated increasingly frantic efforts by Trump and his campaign to undermine confidence in the election, threatening a rash of litigation amid unfounded claims of election rigging.
      “This is a case when they are trying to steal an election, they are trying to rig an election,” Trump said from the podium of the White House briefing room.

      “If you count the legal votes, I easily win, Trump wrongly claimed. “If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.
      “If you count the votes that came in late, we’re looking at them very strongly, a lot of votes came in late,” he said.
      Several TV networks cut away during his remarks, with anchors saying they needed to correct his statements. However, two loyalist senators, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Ted Cruz of Texas, appeared on Fox News to echo Trump’s claims, in the absence of evidence that illegal or late votes were being counted, or that the election is being stolen. Graham whose loyalty had been questioned on Twitter by the president’s son, Don Jr, pledged $500,000 towards the president’s legal fees.
      Reports from inside the White House said the president had no plans to concede the election even after the votes are fully counted.
      From his Delaware headquarters Biden sought to project national leadership, beginning his remarks by talking about the surging coronavirus infection rates, and appealed for patience with the electoral process, after it emerged the US Secret Service was sending extra officers to Delaware to join his security detail.
      “I ask everyone to stay calm. The process is working,” Biden said. “It is the will of the voters – no one, not anyone else – who chooses the president of the United States of America.”
      In the south-west, Biden maintains slim advantages in Arizona and Nevada. In Arizona, his lead narrowed to about 47,000 early on Friday and in Nevada he was ahead by about 11,500 votes.
      Trump had seen his lead steadily shrink in Georgia, a southern state that has not voted for a Democratic presidential nominee since Bill Clinton in 1992, as officials worked through tens of thousands of uncounted votes, many from Democratic strongholds such as Atlanta.
      While Biden’s victories in the upper midwest put him in a strong position, Trump showed no sign of giving up. He was back on Twitter at about 2.30am on Friday, insisting the “US Supreme Court should decide!”.
      While many high-profile Republicans have not commented on Trump’s latest remarks, several GOP lawmakers denounced his baseless allegations about fraud, with Paul Mitchell, a Michigan congressman, saying that every vote would be counted, adding that “anything less harms the integrity of our elections and is dangerous for our democracy”.
      Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois GOP congressman, tweeted: “Stop spreading debunked misinformation … This is getting insane.” More