Trump Loses Court Battle To Ban Drop Boxes In PA

PBS reports:

A federal judge in Pennsylvania has rejected a suit from President Donald Trump’s campaign that sought to bar use of mail ballot drop boxes across the state. The boxes were first used in this year’s primary and were deployed to keep up with unprecedented demand for mail-in voting.

But in June, the Trump campaign sued the state of Pennsylvania and each county board of election in the federal Western District of Pa., arguing the decision by election officials had unconstitutionally taken power away from the legislature.

The suit further argued that varying decisions by different county election boards would lead to an inconsistent election system and that the overall mail voting system would be wracked by fraud.

CNN reports:

Judge Nicholas Ranjan of the Western District of Pennsylvania court also refused to throw out policies in Pennsylvania allowing signatures on mail-in ballots to not strictly match the voters’ signature on file with the state and requiring poll workers to live in the county where they will work on Election Day. He also rejected Republicans’ fears of voter fraud, saying it’s possible but not proven likely.

“While Plaintiffs may not need to prove actual voter fraud, they must at least prove that such fraud is ‘certainly impending.’ They haven’t met that burden. At most, they have pieced together a sequence of uncertain assumptions,” Ranjan wrote in the 138-page opinion. Ranjan, who was appointed to the bench by Trump, noted that Pennsylvania’s state officials and state Supreme Court settled many of questions of voting already for the November election.

Bolding is mine.