The US elections 2020 may not have gone as planned for President Donald Trump's re-election campaign; however, it got something to cheer about on Thursday. In what can be deemed as a minor legal victory, a Pennsylvania judge ruled that a handful of ballots be tossed, citing that they came from people who failed to provide ID by the deadline, which was Monday, Nov. 9.

The Pennsylvania appellate court ruling restricts counties from including mail-in ballots from people who did not validate their identification against state records by Nov. 9. The ruling comes as Trump refuses to accept the election results that saw him losing to his Democrat rival Joe Biden.

The president has repeatedly raised concerns regarding the reliability of the mail-in ballots, baselessly claiming widespread voters fraud. In line with these accusations, Trump's campaign filed lawsuits to challenge the vote counts in several swing states, New York Post reported.

Commonwealth Court President Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt did not allow Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar to extend the deadline to Thursday, arguing that she did not have the authority to do so. The state's top election official urged the federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the president's campaign, seeking to stop the state from certifying the election results.

Boockvar wrote a 45-page motion, requesting for dismissal of the lawsuit, claiming that the court should turn down the Trump campaign's desperate and baseless attempt to distract the vote-counting process, CNBC reported. The campaign had filed the lawsuit just two days after news outlets projected Biden was on the verge of winning Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes, and therefore the presidency.

Details about the precise number of votes that will be scrapped are still scarce; however, it is unlikely to affect Biden's impressive 54,000-vote advantage over the president in the Keystone State, given that they were never even included in Pennsylvania’s official tally.  Only 2,136 ballots were found where the election officials failed to verify the voter’s identification, which is usually done with a driver's license.

Ohio State election law professor Ned Foley told MSNBC that Trump's campaign couldn't go to the court simply because it does not like the vote totals. He explained that it needs to have a legal claim, and more importantly, evidence that backs their legal claim up, noting that's not the case with lawsuits filed by the campaign.