Philadelphia Inquirer: “A Pennsylvania appellate court on Wednesday denied the latest in a string of legal challenges seeking to roll back certification of the election results, ending the last active court battle in the state over the outcome of the race. In a four-page opinion, Commonwealth Court President Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt dismissed the suit brought by a group of nine GOP state lawmakers, led by Rep Daryl Metcalfe, saying they had waited too long to file their challenge.”
“They ‘are unable to demonstrate a clear right to relief or likelihood of prevailing on the merits because their underlying action … is really an improper and untimely election contest,’ she wrote. Metcalfe’s suit, filed Friday, followed a string of other recent lawsuits filed by President Donald Trump’s allies in the GOP, even as Trump himself appears to have abandoned his campaign’s efforts to bludgeon its way to victory through the courts. The ruling from Leavitt, a Republican, came a day after the U.S. Supreme Court declined a request from U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly, a Republican also from Butler County, to void the state’s certified results, which declared President-elect Joe Biden the winner in Pennsylvania by some 81,000 votes. Metcalfe’s suit in state court sought a similar goal. But unlike Kelly, who had argued that the law that widely expanded voting by mail in the state was unconstitutional, Metcalfe zeroed in on decisions by elections administrators and the state’s Supreme Court that which he called ‘so severely flawed it is impossible to certify the accuracy of the purported results.'”