In a bid to intervene in the Trump campaign's sweeping lawsuit over the administration of the election, the groups said that the legal challenge threatened to improperly void ballots cast by hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians.
"This flagrant attempt to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvania voters must be rejected," the groups said.
The Trump campaign alleged Monday that election officials in the state had created an unconstitutional "two-track" system that favored voters in heavily Democratic parts of the state.
Specifically, the campaign pointed to guidance from Pennsylvania's Department of State that allowed counties to try to reach out to voters who submitted defective mail-in ballots — such as those without signatures or the required inner secrecy envelope — either to cure their ballots or to appear at polls on Election Day to vote provisionally.
In practice, however, the campaign said that such efforts were only undertaken in counties where voter registration numbers favored Democrats.
The campaign has also complained that observers were not able to get close enough to where mail-in ballots were being canvassed in Philadelphia and Allegheny County to be able to meaningfully watch the process.
In other counties, meanwhile, the campaign said that observers were allowed much closer to the process.
Between Allegheny County and Philadelphia, the complaint contends there were about 680,000 ballots that had been canvassed without proper observation.
While the lawsuit aims to block Pennsylvania officials from certifying the results of the election entirely, it asked in the alternative to bar the state from certifying the ballots cast in Philadelphia and Allegheny County without sufficient observation.
Former Vice President Joe Biden was declared the winner of the state's 20 electoral votes late Saturday morning, and he maintained a 46,000-vote lead over Trump in the state as of Tuesday afternoon.
The Trump campaign's lawsuit largely repackaged claims from prior suits that the campaign and other Republican candidates in the state have pursued in the week since Election Day trying to invalidate swaths of mail-in ballots.
But as the case moves forward in front of a judge in the Middle District of Pennsylvania, the League of Women Voters, the NAACP, Common Cause Pennsylvania and the Black Political Empowerment Project said they should be allowed to participate given their interest in advocating for voters — particularly historically underrepresented minority voters — in the state.
They argued in their brief that the Trump campaign's brazen and unsupported attack on the administration of the election threatened the rights of their members to cast their ballots.
"Plaintiffs are wrong on the facts and the law, and applicants seek to intervene in this action to protect the interests of individual voters whose fundamental right to vote is under attack and to provide the perspective of organizations whose mission is to facilitate full and fair participation in the electoral process," the petition said.
A Trump campaign representative did not immediately return a message seeking comment Tuesday.
The Trump campaign is represented by Ronald Hicks Jr. and Carolyn McGee of Porter Wright Morris & Arthur LLP and Linda Kerns of the Law Offices of Linda A. Kerns LLC.
The proposed intervenors are represented by Witold Walczak and Marian Schneider of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, Benjamin Geffen, Claudia De Palma and Mary McKenzie of the Public Interest Law Center, Sophia Lin Lakin, Adriel Cepeda Derieux, Lhaab Syed, Dale Ho and Sarah Brannon of the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation, Shankar Duraiswamy, David Ziots and Rani Gupta of Covington & Burling LLP and Ezra Rosenberg, Jon Greenbaum and Kristen Clarke of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
The case is Donald J. Trump for President Inc. et al. v. Kathy Boockvar et al., case number 4:20-cv-02078, in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania.
--Editing by Bruce Goldman.
For a reprint of this article, please contact reprints@law360.com.
