The Daily Fuckup

Correction first: the Pennsylvania election lawsuit at the center of this story was filed on November 9, 2020, not November 9, 2021. The filing was part of Donald Trump’s broader post-election push in Pennsylvania, where his campaign and allied plaintiffs attacked mail-ballot procedures and the uneven use of notice-and-cure practices across counties. The case landed after the vote had already been cast and counted, and after Pennsylvania’s counties were moving through certification under state law.

The plaintiffs’ theory was straightforward: because some counties allowed voters to fix defective mail ballots while others did not, the state’s system supposedly treated voters unequally. But the record in the case shows a narrower dispute than the campaign’s public rhetoric suggested. The Pennsylvania court materials describe a challenge to local discretion over cure procedures, not proof that the election itself was stolen. The complaint also came after the result had already moved in Biden’s favor by tens of thousands of votes in the state.

The federal courts did not buy the argument. In the Third Circuit’s November 27, 2020 opinion, the court noted that Pennsylvania’s certified results showed Biden leading Trump by 81,660 votes and rejected the case’s core allegations. The opinion also emphasized that saying an election was unfair does not make it so. That left the campaign with a familiar outcome: a high-volume legal effort, but no ruling that changed Pennsylvania’s result.

What the filing did accomplish was political. It gave Trump allies another vehicle to keep contesting the 2020 loss in public, even as the court record kept moving in the other direction. The Pennsylvania case became one more example of the post-election strategy: attack ordinary election administration, frame it as systemic fraud, and hope the allegation itself does enough work to outlast the evidence. It didn’t here. The result stood, the lawsuit failed, and the chronology matters: this was a 2020 case, not a fresh 2021 challenge.