Justice Alito--who knows PA and Philly all too well--has weighed in. See the order here.
Shannon Bream
@ShannonBream
BREAKING FROM SCOTUS: Justice Alito has issued an Order than any ballots received after after 8pm on election day in PA be segregated and secured - and if counted, counted separately. There is a petition pending before SCOTUS. Alito orders opposing side to reply by 2p Saturday.
Alito order: "... neither the applicant (PA GOP) nor the Secretary has been able to verify that all boards are complying with the Secretary's guidance, which, it is alleged, is not legally binding on them."
Many of you have rightly noted that this segregating/securing was already supposed to be happening. PA GOP told SCOTUS today neither it nor the PA Sec of Commonwealth could get all the county boards of election to confirm they were actually complying. Now there's a SCOTUS Order.
Well, of course the didn't comply. We all know what is going to be said:
ReplyDelete"Sorry, we uh just mixed all the ballots together, so we don't know which ones came in when, and all the envelopes they arrived in were destroyed in an accidental fire."
Nothing the Dems have attempted against the President over the past four years has been successful.
ReplyDeleteWhy should this election be any different?
(Back to popping popcorn...)
Sounds right, partly because DJT & his main advisors likely know *the country* better than do his foes.
DeleteIf Schumer knows NYC-style "streetfighting", so do DJT *and* Rudy.
The Dem elites quite know DC, state capitals, and other Lefty echo-chamber lairs, but if they had really known the grass roots well, they'd have waited until they could come up with something better than RussiaGate, 25th Amend., Obstruction of Congress, etc.
It seems like too many of them really believe their own propaganda, about how easy it is to snow the Ignorant Deplorables.
So, they think that they can press Mitch, to urge DJT to fold, pushing the Goldwater Watergate analogy.
I'm quite betting, that Mitch knows that DJT's legal case, and the *depth* of his grass-roots public support, dwarfs Nixon's in '74
I rather expect, that Sil. Valley will censor more and more of DJT etc.s tweets and sites.
"complying with the Secretary's guidance, which, it is alleged, is not legally binding on them."
ReplyDeleteFrom what I can see of the (partly illegible) .PDF), Alito says nothing about the legal status of the Secretary's *guidance*.
Is such guidance always legally binding?
Any bets, on whether the MS will try to duck covering this Alito order?
ReplyDeleteIt's not the voters' fault that some districts potentially ignored this segregation requirement. But any decision to commingle these votes was deliberate and designed to frustrate the SC orders. Why wouldn't it be out of bounds to simply toss all votes from districts who flagrantly disregarded this order?
ReplyDeleteI've also read the argument that ordering a re-do on the election itself may be problematic since it is Congress who sets the date of the election by law. What else could the SC do here? Punt to the legislature and let them handle how to cure the results?
Something odd is going on in Pennsylvania again.
ReplyDeleteI have been watching the progress over the last 3 days as Biden overtook Trump. However, today, that progress slowed to a crawl after Biden took the lead- he has increased his lead from 13,000 this morning (was a deficit of 40,000 Thursday night) to 28,000 today, after making up 666,000 Wednesday and Thursday.
Many people on twitter pointed out the ridiculous 20,000 vote drops where Trump literally got zero votes, and it occurred to me that the counters in the big blue counties might be trying to create a narrative where Biden is overtaking the lead quickly, and the way to that is to simply count, but only report forward the votes Biden got, keeping Trump's votes hidden to the last possible moment. You might do this if you were trying to create a narrative, but also to buy time if you know that Trump is actually still ahead.
I think it a low probability this is the case, but it would explain why the count was so very glacial today, even though it was basically just Allegheny and Philadelphia County counting today- in other words, I had anticipated that Biden would be ahead by 150,000 votes by now- that is what the math says. It could actually be that Trump has a large majority of the remaining ballots, and the blue counties are just sitting on them until they get their marching orders, or waiting for more mail to come in.
Is this really about ballot deadlines or the Penn court rewriting the law. In 2019, the PA legislature passed a law called Act 77 that permitted all voters to cast their ballots by mail .” The exact text is 2019 Pa. Leg. Serv. Act 2019-77.
ReplyDeleteAct 77 also provided that if this portion of the law was invalidated, that much of the rest of Act 77, including its liberalization of mail-in voting, would also be void. The exact text is: “Sections 1, 2, 3, 3.2, 4, 5, 5.1, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 12 of this act are nonseverable. If any provision of this act or its application to any person or circumstance is held invalid, the remaining provisions or applications of this act are void.”
To again put this into common English, the Pennsylvania legislature passed a law that said mail-in ballots had to arrive by 8PM on election day to be counted, and then said that if the Court over-ruled that law, the entire law that permitted mail-in ballots was invalid.
Trump must argue that under article II the Penn court had now right to rewrite the law and when the Penn Court changed the law, it invalidated the law and its application as originally intended by the legislative branch, therefor all mail in ballots are invalid.