The opinion concludes:

Voters, not lawyers, choose the President. Ballots, not briefs, decide elections. The ballots here are governed by Pennsylvania election law. No federal law requires poll watchers or specifies where they must live or how close they may stand when votes are counted. Nor does federal law govern whether to count ballots with minor state-law defects or let voters cure those defects. Those are all issues of state law, not ones that we can hear. And earlier lawsuits have rejected those claims.

Seeking to turn those state-law claims into federal ones, the Campaign claims discrimination. But its alchemy cannot transmute lead into gold. The Campaign never alleges that any ballot was fraudulent or cast by an illegal voter. It never alleges that any defendant treated the Trump campaign or its votes worse than it treated the Biden campaign or its votes. Calling something discrimination does not make it so. The Second Amended Complaint still suffers from these core defects, so granting leave to amend would have been futile.

And there is no basis to grant the unprecedented injunction sought here. First, for the reasons already given, the Campaign is unlikely to succeed on the merits. Second, it shows no irreparable harm, offering specific challenges to many fewer ballots than the roughly 81,000-vote margin of victory. Third, the Campaign is responsible for its delay and repetitive litigation. Finally, the public interest strongly favors finality, counting every lawful voter’s vote, and not disenfranchising millions of Pennsylvania voters who voted by mail. Plus, discarding those votes could disrupt every other election on the ballot.

We will thus affirm the District Court’s denial of leave to amend, and we deny an injunction pending appeal…

.

In a new filing in the Third Circuit (that should appear on the docket tomorrow), the Trump campaign did not ask for the appeals court to issue an immediate order delaying certification, which is what I expected. They do not even ask for an immediate order reversing the trial court’s motion to dismiss and granting some kind of preliminary relief for additional discovery. Instead, the only ask, at least so far, is for an order for the district to consider on the merits the campaign’s proposed Second Amended complaint: “Appellants will request that this Court reverse denial of the Motion to Amend and direct the District Court to promptly decide it on the merits and proceed expeditiously to a hearing to enjoin certifying the results of the Presidential Election (or order decertification if already certified) if the Second Amended Complaint (ECF 172-2) is held to state valid claims.”

This is odd for a number of reasons. First, this is an emergency election case, and it seems crazy to me that if one were litigating over the presidential election one would NOT seek to get appellate review of an adverse ruling as soon as possible. Second, all that this asks for is for the district court to consider the proposed second amended complaint on the merits. Given the scathing ruling on the first amended complaint yesterday, and the similar defects with the second amended complaint (including lack of standing), there’s no reason to expect the district court would reach any different conclusion if it considered the second amended complaint. This is especially true given the deference usually applied to decisions about accepting a second amended complaint. Third, the motion does not even ask the Third Circuit to weigh in on the controlling legal case that was just decided last week by the circuit, something which is potentially the whole ball game on standing in the case.

There are other problems with this filing too, such as the odd claim that “The proposed Second Amended Complaint (ECF 172-2) asserts claims under the Civil Rights Act for violation of the Equal Protection and Due Process clause.” Those clauses are in the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment, not the Civil Rights Act.

Just bizarre and weak.