Pennsylvania�s highest court on Saturday night threw out a lower court�s order preventing the state from certifying dozens of contests on its Nov. 3 election ballot in the latest lawsuit filed by Republicans attempting to thwart President-elect Joe Biden�s victory in the battleground state.

The state Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, threw out the three-day-old order, saying the underlying lawsuit was filed months after the expiration of a time limit in Pennsylvania�s expansive year-old mail-in voting law allowing for challenges to it.

Justices also remarked on the lawsuit�s staggering demand that an entire election be overturned retroactively.

�They have failed to allege that even a single mail-in ballot was fraudulently cast or counted,� Justice David Wecht wrote in a concurring opinion.

The state�s attorney general, Democrat Josh Shapiro, called the court�s decision �another win for Democracy.�

President Donald Trump and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, meanwhile, have repeatedly claimed that Democrats falsified mail-in ballots to steal the election from Trump. Biden beat Trump by more than 80,000 votes in Pennsylvania, a state Trump had won in 2016.

The week-old lawsuit, led by Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly of northwestern Pennsylvania, had challenged the state�s mail-in voting law as unconstitutional.

As a remedy, Kelly and the other Republican plaintiffs had sought to either throw out the 2.5 million mail-in ballots submitted under the law � most of them by Democrats � or to wipe out the election results and direct the state�s Republican-controlled Legislature to pick Pennsylvania�s presidential electors.

In any case, that request � for the state�s lawmakers to pick Pennsylvania�s presidential electors � flies in the face of a nearly century-old state law that already grants the power to pick electors to the state�s popular vote, Wecht wrote.

While the high court�s two Republicans joined the five Democrats in opposing those remedies, they split from Democrats in suggesting that the lawsuit�s underlying claims � that the state�s mail-in voting law might violate the constitution � are worth considering.

Commonwealth Court Judge Patricia McCullough, elected as a Republican in 2009, had issued the order Wednesday to halt certification of any remaining contests, including apparently contests for Congress.

It did not appear to affect the presidential contest since a day earlier, Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, had certified Biden as the winner of the presidential election in Pennsylvania.

Wolf quickly appealed McCullough�s decision to the state Supreme Court, saying there was no �conceivable justification� for it.

The lawsuit�s dismissal comes after Republicans have lost a flurry of legal challenges brought by the Trump campaign and its GOP allies filed in state and federal courts in Pennsylvania.

On Friday, a federal appeals court in Philadelphia roundly rejected the Trump campaign�s latest effort to challenge the state�s election results.

In that lawsuit, Trump�s campaign had complained that its observers had not been able to scrutinize mail-in ballots as they were being processed in two Democratic bastions, Philadelphia and Allegheny County, which is home to Pittsburgh.

Trump�s lawyers vowed to appeal to the Supreme Court despite the judges� assessment that the �campaign�s claims have no merit.�

(AP)