Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro (D) on Friday joked that he would be taking his son’s phone away after he accidentally walked in on Shapiro’s MSNBC interview on the Trump campaign’s efforts to halt absentee ballot counting in the state.
“I’m taking his phone away for 24 hours,” Shapiro wrote along with a laughing emoji in a tweet sharing a video of the moment his son walked into the room where Shapiro was participating in a virtual interview with MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace.
Shapiro’s son can be seen looking down at his phone as he enters the room before looking up and noticing his father speaking to the news channel. His son then slowly backs away as Shapiro continues speaking, seemingly unfazed by the interruption.
“This attempt by Donald Trump and those aligned with him to get those ballots thrown out and run to the Supreme Court as they have indicated, clearly that’s failed. They’ve refused to intervene and ultimately those ballots are going to be counted,” Shapiro said during the interview as his son walked in.
Shapiro’s daughter, Sophia, shared the video in multiple tweets, saying she was a “proud sister” and “my brother is a meme now and I am here for it.”
The Trump campaign has filed lawsuits in several battleground states, including Pennsylvania, with President Trump claiming without evidence that there have been multiple cases of voter fraud in a Democratic attempt to steal the election from him.
On Friday, the Supreme Court ordered Pennsylvania election boards to separately count mail ballots that arrived after Election Day, while also rejecting a GOP request to stop counting those votes.
The order, signed by conservative Justice Samuel Alito, left open the possibility that the justices could exclude the late-arriving ballots in a subsequent ruling. The order also marked the first time the Supreme Court has gotten involved in a state ballot count after Election Day.
Alito urged Pennsylvania’s Democratic Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, the respondent in the case, to file any response no later than Saturday at 2 p.m.
The order granted only part of what was sought by Pennsylvania Republicans, who are challenging the state’s extended Friday mail ballot deadline. The state GOP had requested justices halt the counting of late-arriving ballots.
Early Friday, Democratic nominee Joe Biden had overtaken Trump’s previous lead in Pennsylvania with the counting of more absentee ballots from Democratic-leaning voting districts, and shortly after 11 a.m., Biden’s lead in the Keystone State grew to more than 30,000 votes, causing multiple news outlets to declare him as the projected winner in the state and subsequently, the White House race.
In an interview with CBS News on Friday, Shapiro said that he believed the legal filings from Trump’s team would have little impact on the vote tallying process.
“There’s been a lot of activity but really no change. The ballots are being counted, public servants and our communities are doing their best to follow the law and make sure that all these legal votes are counted,” Shapiro said in the CBS interview.
“There’s a lot of chatter, there’s a lot of noise, but there’s been no legal impact,” he added. “These ballots are valid, they’re lawful and they are being counted in Pennsylvania.”