COURTESY OF THE COMMITTEE TO ELECT JIM BREWSTER AND FRIENDS OF NICOLE ZICCARELLI
The fate of a state Senate seat in the Pittsburgh area remains in limbo even after the chamber started a new session Tuesday.
Republicans refused to swear in McKeesport Democrat Jim Brewster pending a court challenge from his November election opponent, Nicole Ziccarelli. But it is unclear when a ruling by U.S. District Judge Nicholas Ranjan will be forthcoming, or how senators in either party will react to it.
Brewster beat Ziccarelli, a Lower Burrell Republican, in the race for Senate District 45 by just 69 votes, according to state-certified returns. Key to the three-term incumbent’s victory was a batch of mail-in ballots that were cast on time in Allegheny County but without a handwritten date on an outer envelope. (The ballots were time-stamped upon their arrival at the county s election office, demonstrating that they had been received in time.) Without those ballots, Republicans say, Zicca
Liz DyeDecember 21, 2020 12:06 PM Vote Them Out Donald Trump GIF by Women’s March
Broadly speaking, the post-election litigation can be divided into two buckets: 1) the Kraken batshit fraud claims, which sometimes put on their party dresses and pretend to be legit challenges to signature matching technology; and 2) the suits that allege state officials unconstitutionally usurped the power of state legislatures to govern electoral procedures. The Kraken suits get oxygen from the wingnut media hyping their nonsense claims 24-7. But the more reasonable cases are predicated on a pair of pre-election decisions where Justices Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch signaled they might be willing to start invalidating state court interpretations of election law because state legislatures are the elections REAL DADDY.
Courtesy of Jim Brewster, Nicole Ziccarelli
Sen. Jim Brewster and Nicole Ziccarelli are vying for the 45th district state Senate seat.
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A pending federal lawsuit is likely to determine who represents residents in the state’s 45th Senatorial District.
Incumbent Jim Brewster, a Democrat from McKeesport, currently holds a 73-vote lead over New Kensington lawyer Nicole Ziccarelli, a Republican.
But a federal judge in Pittsburgh is considering a lawsuit Ziccarelli’s campaign filed in late November seeking to overturn an Allegheny County Board of Elections decision to count more than 2,300 ballots submitted with incorrect or missing dates handwritten on outer envelopes.