Trump campaign appeals loss in Pennsylvania election dispute

US President Donald Trump's campaign has told a judge it was appealing a ruling issued on Saturday that denied its request to halt President-elect Joe Biden's win in Pennsylvania.

The campaign said in a court filing on Sunday that it appealed US District Judge Matthew Brann's decision to the US 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, a day before the state's 67 counties are set to certify their results and send them to state officials.

Brann — a Republican and Federalist Society member in central Pennsylvania — compared the campaign's legal arguments to “Frankenstein's Monster,” concluding that Trump's team offered only “speculative accusations," not proof of rampant corruption.

Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor who specialises in election law, called the Trump lawsuits dangerous.

“It is a sideshow, but it’s a harmful sideshow," Levitt said. “It’s a toxic sideshow. The continuing baseless, evidence-free claims of alternative facts are actually having an effect on a substantial number of Americans. They are creating the conditions for elections not to work in the future.”

READ MORE: Trump seeks appeal of Pennsylvania ruling on election fraud claims

Dozens of legal challenges

Not a single court has found merit in the core legal claims, but that did not stop Trump's team from firing off nearly two dozen legal challenges to Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania, including an early morning suit on Election Day filed by a once-imprisoned lawyer.

The president's lawyers fought the three-day grace period for mail-in ballots to arrive. They complained they weren't being let in to observe the vote count. They said Democratic counties unfairly let voters fix mistakes on their ballot envelopes. Everywhere they turned, they said, they sniffed fraud.

Efforts were led by Rudy Giuliani, Trump's personal lawyer, who descended on the state the Saturday after the November 3 election as the count dragged on and the president played golf. Summoning reporters to Philadelphia on November 7, he held forth at a site that would soon become legendary: Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

“I felt insidious fraud going on,” Philadelphia poll watcher Lisette Tarragano said when Giuliani called her to the microphone at the landscaping company.

US appeals court found Pennsylvania's extension for mail-in ballots laudatory, given the disruption and mail delays cause by the pandemic. Judges in Michigan and Arizona, finding no evidence of fraud, refused to block the certification of county vote tallies.

READ MORE: Trump's lawsuit over Pennsylvania vote heads to court