Law firm withdraws from the Pennsylvania case challenging the election.
PENNSYLVANIA United States (Times Media Mexico) – Trump law firm withdraws from the Pennsylvania case challenging the election. They sought to have mail-in ballots thrown out. It is another hard blow to Trump’s efforts to contest the 2020 election result in court.
The Ohio-based Porter Wright Morris & Arthur law 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.
Here is @PorterWright resigning from the Trump case. pic.twitter.com/sBGRCkAqH3
— David Enrich (@davidenrich) November 13, 2020
“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 state’s election result. “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 the news first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
And in Michigan, a judge refused to halt the certification of Detroit-area election results. It was the third time a judge has declined to intervene in the Michigan count.
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 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.
