On Tuesday the Trump campaign’s longest-running post-election complaint was rejected by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, ruling that officials in Philadelphia did not violate state law by maintaining at least 15 feet of separation between observers and the workers counting ballots.
The ruling is likely to undercut the Trump campaign’s case in federal court, where Rudy Giuliani joined a hearing Tuesday afternoon to argue on behalf of Donald Trump’s effort to contest the election results in Pennsylvania.
The Republican observers said they were kept so far back, behind a waist-high fence, that they couldn’t see any of the details on ballot envelopes or reach any conclusions about whether vote-counting procedures were correctly followed.
With a 5-2 vote, the state Supreme Court said Pennsylvania law requires only that observers must be allowed “in the room” where ballots are counted but does not set a minimum distance between them and the counting tables.
The court said the legislature is left up to county election boards to make these decisions.
