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- The Trump campaign dropped a major part of its lawsuit regarding their allegation that observers were not allowed to watch vote counts in Pennsylvania, The Washington Post reported Sunday.
- Campaign lawyers filed a revised lawsuit Sunday that removed a request to prohibit the certification of ballots that the “Trump Campaign’s watchers were prevented from observing.”
- The revised lawsuit seeks an order to block the validating of ballots cast by some voters who were allowed to fix errors on their ballot, which reportedly does not affect a significant number of votes.
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The Trump campaign dropped a major part of its lawsuit regarding their allegation that observers were not allowed to watch vote counts in Pennsylvania, The Washington Post reported Sunday.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that his campaign’s poll watchers were not allowed to observe vote counts. Trump and his allies have asserted more than 600,000 votes counted in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh should be thrown out for this reason.
Since President-elect Joe Biden was projected to win the election, President Donald Trump has declined to concede, instead requesting recounts and mounting legal challenges in a number of battleground states.
In a federal lawsuit filed in Pennsylvania, Trump’s campaign repeated similar claims about poll watchers. However, lawyers for the campaign filed a new version of the lawsuit on Sunday that removed a request for an emergency order to prohibit the certification of ballots that the “Trump Campaign’s watchers were prevented from observing.”
A number of paragraphs from the original lawsuit were nixed from the beginning of the revised report. Those paragraphs pertained to the campaign’s repeated complaints that their observers were not allowed to watch vote counting at polling centers.
The revised lawsuit seeks an order to block the validating of ballots cast by voters who were allowed to fix errors on their ballot in a way that the lawsuit claims "illegally disadvantaged" Republicans.
"Now you're only talking about a handful of ballots," Cliff Levine, a lawyer for the Democrats in the case, told The Post. "They would have absolutely no impact on the total count or on Joe Biden's win over Donald Trump."
Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal attorney, took issue with The Post's report.
"Do not use the law firm of Swaine & Viebeck," Giuliani tweeted, referring to The Post reporters who wrote the story. Giuliani wrote that the revised lawsuit does repeat the campaign's allegations that more than 600,000 votes were "deliberately concealed from Republican inspectors."
The allegations are still included in the lawsuit, though Giuliani did not explain why the request to block the certifications of those votes was dropped.
Representatives for Giuliani and the Trump campaign did not respond to Business Insider's request for comment.
The president again tweeted about observers being denied access to vote counts shortly after The Post reported that the Trump campaign had revised the lawsuit.
"Why does the Fake News Media continuously assume that Joe Biden will ascend to the Presidency, not even allowing our side to show, which we are just getting ready to do, how badly shattered and violated our great Constitution has been in the 2020 Election," Trump tweeted Sunday night.
He wrote that "large numbers of Poll Watchers ... were thrown out of vote counting rooms in many of our States." He also repeated other claims of voter fraud being committed by Democrats that have not been substantiated.
Earlier in the day, Trump appeared to acknowledge in a tweet that Biden "won" the election, though he later tweeted, "I concede NOTHING!"