A Bucks County judge has thrown out an appeal from President Donald Trump’s campaign, rejecting its bid to get 2,117 absentee ballots invalidated on technicalities.
In his decision, released late Thursday afternoon, Judge Robert Baldi wrote that most of the contested ballots contained “minor irregularities,” and that tossing them out is “not necessary to prevent fraud, and there would be no other significant interest undermined by allowing these ballots to be counted.”
The suit was similar to many that the Trump campaign has filed around the country to contest ballots for various reasons. It was in the Bucks County Court of Common Pleas on appeal, after a lower court also ruled against Trump.
The campaign’s questions about ballot validity had nothing to do with fraud.
In fact, in his order, Baldi took pains to point out that the parties in the case “specifically stipulated” that “there exists no evidence of any fraud, misconduct, or any impropriety with respect to the challenged ballots.”
Instead, the issues were things like missing dates, misplaced or missing signatures, and envelope irregularities.
When Bucks County’s Board of Elections reviewed the mail ballots that had been cast, they flagged 3,095 as having potential issues. Of those, they threw out 918 for having missing signatures or privacy envelopes — defects that are, legally, considered to be more serious.
They allowed the remaining 2,177. Those had less serious violations of election guidelines, like missing or partial dates and addresses, mismatched addresses and unsealed privacy envelopes.
In all of those cases, the judge decided the errors were not justification for tossing out ballots cast in good faith.
On the topic of unsealed envelopes, for instance, he wrote that “if the glue on the envelope failed that would be the responsibility of the government…it would be an injustice to disenfranchise these voters.”