A federal appeals court on Friday rejected a request from President Donald Trump’s campaign to block President-elect Joe Biden from declaring the winner in Pennsylvania, marking another major setback to Trump’s bid to nullify the November 3 election results.

Trump’s lawyers have pledged to appeal to the Supreme Court despite the judge’s assessment that the “campaign allegations are unfounded.”

Free and fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. The charges of wrongdoing are serious. But describing the election as unfair does not make it so. The fee requires specific claims and then proof. Judge Stephanos Pepas wrote before the three-judge panel.

Pennsylvania saw Biden, who won the state’s popular vote, this week. Under Pennsylvania law, a candidate who wins the state’s popular vote gets all 20 of the state’s electoral votes.

Trump has refused to concede to his Democratic rival and continues to claim fraud on a massive scale without evidence.

Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani debated the case last week in a lower court, insisting within five hours of oral arguments that the 2020 presidential election was marred by widespread fraud in Pennsylvania. However, Giuliani failed to provide any concrete evidence of this in court.

Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s personal attorney, defended the case in the president’s favor

US District Court Judge Matthew Bran said the campaign’s flawed complaint, “like Frankenstein’s monster, was randomly collected” and denied Giuliani the right to amend it a second time.

The US Third Circuit Court of Appeals described this decision as justified.

The commission’s three judges have been appointed by Republican presidents. Including Pepas, a former law professor at the University of Pennsylvania appointed by Trump. Trump’s sister, Judge Marian Trump Barry, has sat in court for 20 years, retiring in 2019.

Biden defeated Trump by more than 80,000 votes in Pennsylvania. Nationwide, Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris garnered nearly 80 million votes, a record in the US presidential election.

Trump said he hoped the Supreme Court would intervene in the race as it did in 2000, when its decision to halt the recount in Florida gave Republican George W. Bush the election.

On November 5, as the vote count continued, Trump posted a tweet saying, “The US Supreme Court must decide!”

Since then, Trump and his agents have attacked the election as flawed and filed a series of lawsuits to try to block results in six states as a battlefield. But they found little sympathy from the judges, almost all of whom dismissed the complaints about the safety of mail ballots that millions of people used to vote on from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Joe Biden wins the popular vote in Pennsylvania, which gives him the state’s 20 electoral votes

Trump may be hoping that the Supreme Court he helped steer toward a conservative 6-3 majority will be more open to his appeals, especially since the Supreme Court upheld Pennsylvania’s decision to accept polling by mail through November 6 by a final 4-4 vote. Month. Since then, Trump nominee Amy Connie Barrett has joined the court.

“The judicial mechanism active in Pennsylvania continues to cover up allegations of mass fraud,” Trump lawyer Gina Ellis wrote on Twitter after the ruling on Friday. “To Scotus!”

In the case that preceded Bran, the Trump campaign asked to disqualify 6.8 million voters in the state, or at least 700,000 who voted by mail in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and other Democratic-leaning areas.

“One might expect that in pursuing such an astonishing outcome,” Bran wrote in his blunt judgment on November 21, “the plaintiff would come enormously armed with convincing legal arguments and realistic proof of rampant corruption.”

A separate Republican challenge that reached the Pennsylvania Supreme Court this week seeks to prevent the state from certifying any ballot races.

Democratic Governor Tom Wolf’s administration is resisting the effort, saying it will prevent the state legislature and congressional delegation from sitting in the coming weeks.

Trump said on Thursday that the November 3 election was still far from over. However, he has made the clearest signal yet that he will leave the White House peacefully on January 20 if the Electoral College formalizes Biden’s victory.

‘I definitely will. Trump said at the White House, responding to reporters’ questions for the first time since Election Day.

On Friday, however, he continued to attack Detroit, Atlanta and other democratic cities with large numbers of blacks as the source of “massive voter fraud.” He claimed, without evidence, that a Pennsylvania poll watcher had discovered computer memory drives that “gave Biden 50,000 votes” each.

All 50 states must ratify their results prior to the Electoral College meeting on December 14, and any objection to the results must be resolved by December 8. Biden won both the Electoral College and the popular vote by wide margins.