US Supreme Court rejects Trump’s last-ditch effort to overturn Pennsylvania’s certification that Joe Biden won battleground state

The US Supreme Court has rejected Donald Trump’s last-ditch efforts to overturn Pennsylvania’s certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the electoral battleground, meaning he will be certified by the Electoral College as the winner.

The court without comment refused to call into question the certification process in Pennsylvania by voiding its mail-in ballots. 

“The application for injunctive relief presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the Court is denied,” the ruling issued by the court read.

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf already has certified Biden’s victory and the state’s 20 electors are to meet on Dec. 14 to cast their votes for Biden. Biden beat President Donald Trump by more than 80,000 votes in Pennsylvania, a state Trump had won in 2016.

Biden won 306 electoral votes, and if Pennsylvania’s results had been in doubt, he still would have more than the 270 electoral votes needed to become president.

The court’s decision came after Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly of northeastern Pennsylvania and GOP congressional candidate and Trump favorite Sean Parnell, who lost to Pittsburgh-area U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb, a Democrat, filed the lawsuit.

“Even Trump appointees & Republicans saw this for what it was: a charade,” Lamb said on Twitter.

In court filings, lawyers for Pennsylvania and Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, had called the lawsuit’s claims “fundamentally frivolous” and its request “one of the most dramatic, disruptive invocations of judicial power in the history of the Republic.”

“No court has ever issued an order nullifying a governor’s certification of presidential election results,” they wrote.