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Trump campaign jettisons major parts of its legal challenge against Pennsylvania’s election results

Trump’s lawsuit now focuses on allegations that Republicans were illegally disadvantaged because some Democratic-leaning counties allowed voters to fix errors on their mail ballots.

Workers on the hall floor at the Pennsylvania Convention Center counting the Mail-in ballots from yesterdays, Presidential election. Counting is being held at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, 12th and Arch St. in Center City Philadelphia on Wednesday, November 4, 2020.
Workers on the hall floor at the Pennsylvania Convention Center counting the Mail-in ballots from yesterdays, Presidential election. Counting is being held at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, 12th and Arch St. in Center City Philadelphia on Wednesday, November 4, 2020.Read moreALEJANDRO A. ALVAREZ / Staff Photographer
    by Jon Swaine and Elise Viebeck, Washington Post
    Published 

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s campaign on Sunday scrapped a major part of its federal lawsuit challenging the election results in Pennsylvania.

Trump's attorneys filed a revised version of the lawsuit, removing allegations that election officials violated the Trump campaign's constitutional rights by limiting the ability of their observers to watch votes being counted.

Trump and Rudy Giuliani, his personal attorney, have said repeatedly that more than 600,000 votes in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh should be invalidated because of this issue.

Trump’s pared-down lawsuit now focuses on allegations that Republicans were illegally disadvantaged because some Democratic-leaning counties allowed voters to fix errors on their mail ballots. Counties have said this affected only a small number of votes.

Cliff Levine, an attorney representing the Democratic Party in the case, said on Sunday evening that Trump's move meant his lawsuit could not possibly change the result.

"Now you're only talking about a handful of ballots," said Levine. "They would have absolutely no impact on the total count or on Joe Biden's win over Donald Trump."

Kathy Boockvar, Pennsylvania's Democratic secretary of state, submitted a court filing in response to the Trump campaign's actions reiterating her request for the judge to dismiss the lawsuit.

The shift comes amid a string of losses in the Trump campaign's postelection legal effort, which claimed without evidence that voter fraud, irregularities and rule-breaking led to President-elect Joe Biden's victory. Taken together, the flurry of postelection litigation has affirmed the integrity of the election: many of the complaints have been tossed, and not a single vote has been invalidated.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment Sunday evening. Earlier in the day, Trump suggested that his legal challenges to the election results would continue to come.

"Many of the court cases being filed all over the Country are not ours, but rather those of people that have seen horrible abuses," he said in a tweet. "Our big cases showing the unconstitutionality of the 2020 Election, & the outrage of things that were done to change the outcome, will soon be filed!"

But even as the campaign continued filing appeals in other Pennsylvania cases on Sunday night, the withdrawal of one of its most aggressive claims curtails a central part of its effort to fend off the certification of the vote in the state.

The revised filing came on a day when Trump reiterated his intention not to concede the election to Biden, moments after seeming to acknowledge the results of the Nov. 3 election. Biden won the popular vote and was projected the winner of the race, having received 306 electoral college votes to Trump's 232. States are still certifying the results.

The Washington Post’s Aaron Schaffer and Keith Newell contributed to this article.