Just Politics

[BullNBear52]

Wrong suit.

And Alito is so stupid he needed to update a response from PA. He is twisting himself into a Philly pretzel trying to bend over backwards for idiotic court filings.

Pa. officials tell Supreme Court disqualifying mail-in votes would ‘sow chaos and confusion’
Paula Reed WardPAULA REED WARD | Tuesday, December 8, 2020 1:52 p.m.


About an hour ago

Attorneys for Pennsylvania election officials told the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday that granting an injunction requested by challengers to the state’s mail-in voting law would “sow chaos and confusion” across the nation.

The filing asserts that U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Butler, and others have no federal claim for which the court ought to get involved — and no standing on which to bring it.

Kelly and Sean Parnell, the Republican challenger to U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb, D-Mt. Lebanon, filed an initial complaint in Commonwealth Court against Gov. Tom Wolf, Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar and the General Assembly on Nov. 22, alleging that Act 77, which broadened the state’s mail-in voting laws, was unconstitutional under Pennsylvania law.

They alleged that the only way to change the state’s absentee voting was through a constitutional amendment.


In their petition, they sought to have either the 2.6 million votes cast by mail-in ballot disqualified, or for the court to throw out the entirety of the election results so that the Republican-controlled legislature could appoint Pennsylvania’s electors for president.

President-Elect Joe Biden won Pennsylvania by 81,000 votes.

The state Supreme Court threw out Kelly’s claims, saying they were time-barred — and that Act 77 required any constitutional challenges be filed within 180 days of its October 2019 passage.

After losing in the state Supreme Court, Kelly filed for injunctive relief with the U.S. Supreme Court.

Justice Samuel Alito, who oversees emergency filings for Pennsylvania, initially set a response deadline for Pennsylvania’s officials for Wednesday — the day after the federal Safe Harbor deadline.

That date signaled to many constitutional scholars that it was unlikely the court would upend Pennsylvania’s election results once the Safe Harbor date had passed.

On Sunday, Alito updated the schedule and required Pennsylvania officials to respond by 9 a.m. Tuesday.

In their response, attorneys for the state wrote that the petitioners’ claims are “fundamentally frivolous,” and that the remedy they seek is unheard of.

“Petitioners ask this court to undertake one of the most dramatic, disruptive invocations of judicial power in the history of the Republic,” they wrote. “[T]o say that the public interest militates against petitioners would be a grave understatement.”

In their filing, the respondents said that Kelly and the other petitioners failed to state any federal claim to the Pennsylvania courts, and that therefore the U.S. Supreme Court has no jurisdiction to even take up the case.

In addition, they wrote that the petitioner’s claims are barred because the relief they seek — to overturn Pennsylvania’s election results — is retroactive, which is forbidden under laches, the doctrine that forbids claims based on unreasonable delay.

Further, they wrote that voters reasonably relied on the election rules in place at the time they voted, and therefore, there cannot be retroactive disenfranchisement. Under that principle, the respondents said the U.S. Supreme Court has “declined to overturn election results even where it later found flaws in the election process.”

The state officials also argue that Act 77 could have been challenged by the petitioners much sooner than nearly 13 months after it was enacted.

They claim that, instead, the petitioners waited until after two elections — and after their candidate for president lost — to file a challenge.

As to the substance of their claim — that the General Assembly had no right to alter Pennsylvania’s mail-in voting process, state officials disagree, saying that the only limitation on them in altering the law was to maintain secrecy in the voting process. That, they said, was accomplished by Act 77’s requirement for mail-in voters to use a secrecy envelope.

Attorneys for the state said the petition comes against the backdrop, nationally, of unfounded claims of fraud that “wrongly impugn the integrity of the democratic process and aim to cast doubt on the legitimacy of its outcome.”

“Their suit is nothing less than an affront to constitutional democracy,” they said. “It should meet a swift and decisive end.”

Paula Reed Ward is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Paula by email at [e-mail] or via Twitter .

https://triblive.com/local/regional/pa-officials-tell-supreme-court-disqualifying-mail-in-votes-would-sow-chaos-and-confusion/