A federal judge in the US state of Pennsylvania dismissed a lawsuit filed by the re-election campaign of President Donald Trump, seeking to block millions of mail-in ballots.
The lawsuit claimed that some counties in Pennsylvania allowed mail-in voters to fix problems with the ballots by casting provisional votes.
Saturday’s ruling by US District Court Judge Matthew Brann was made on the grounds that the lawsuit provided "strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence".
Trump's campaign has so far declined to announce the President's defeat to his rival, former vice President Democrat Joe Biden in the 3 November presidential election, saying a large number of mail-in ballots were cast illegally.
In his scathing and lengthy opinion, Judge Brann said the Trump campaign asked him to "disenfranchise almost 7 million voters", and that he could not find any case in which a plaintiff "has sought such a drastic remedy in the contest of an election".
After the dismissal of the lawsuit, Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani and the campaign's senior legal adviser Jenna Ellis said that they would seek an expedited appeal to the US Third Circuit Court of Appeals.
They said the latest development will help quicken their effort to push the case to the US Supreme Court.
US media have projected that Biden has won 306 Electoral College votes, surpassing the 270 votes needed to clinch the presidency.
The watershed moment came on 7 November, when Pennsylvania was called for Biden, who now leads Trump in the state by over 81,000 votes, a margin believed to be insurmountable even if those erroneously cast ballots were excluded.
While Biden has claimed victory, Trump launched a slew of litigations challenging the results in states that, in addition to Pennsylvania, also include Michigan, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona.
Most of those efforts have either been withdrawn by the campaign itself or rejected by the courts, which cited the lack of proof as the reason.
The Electoral College representatives will meet on 14 December to formally select the next US President.
(The original article has been edited for length.)
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