[ad_1]
WASHINGTON: Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin on Thursday urged the U.S. Supreme Court to reject a lawsuit brought by Texas and backed by President Donald Trump that seeks to undo the election victory of President-elect Joe Biden, saying the case does not it has factual or legal grounds and makes “false” claims.
“What Texas is doing in this proceeding is asking this court to reconsider a mass of unfounded claims about problems with the election that have already been considered and rejected by this court and other courts,” Josh Shapiro, Democratic Pennsylvania Attorney General wrote in a presentation to the nine judges.
Texas filed the long-term lawsuit against the four electoral battleground states directly with the Supreme Court on Tuesday.
He called for the voting results in those states to be removed due to their changes to voting procedures that allowed for expanded voting by mail during the coronavirus pandemic.
The Trump campaign and its allies have already been rejected in numerous lawsuits in state and federal courts challenging the election results.
Legal experts have said that the Texas lawsuit has little chance of success and have questioned whether Texas has the legal capacity to challenge election procedures in other states.
Biden, a Democrat, defeated Trump in all four states in the November 3 election. The Republican president won them in the 2016 elections.
The Texas lawsuit, Shapiro wrote, was adding to a “cacophony of false false claims” about the election.
Trump has falsely claimed he won reelection and has made unsubstantiated allegations of widespread election fraud. State election officials have said they have found no evidence of such fraud.
Dana Nessel, the Democratic attorney general of Michigan, listed the many cases filed in that state that Trump and his supporters have lost.
“The challenge here is unprecedented, with no factual foundation or valid legal basis,” Nessel wrote in the Michigan filing.
Chris Carr, the Republican attorney general of Georgia, said Texas cannot show that it has been harmed by election results in other states.
“The novel and far-reaching claims that Texas asserts, and the amazing remedies it seeks, are impossible to base on legal principles and unmanageable,” Carr wrote in the Georgia filing.
Josh Kaul, the Democratic attorney general for Wisconsin, noted that Trump had already obtained counts in the two most Democratic counties in the state, and showed no problems with the results.
“There has been no indication of fraud, or anything else that casts doubt on the reliability of the election results,” Kaul wrote in the Wisconsin filing.
Trump meets with a Texas official
Trump filed a motion in court Wednesday asking justices to allow him to step in and become a plaintiff in the lawsuit brought by Ken Paxton, the Republican attorney general of Texas and ally of the president.
Trump met Thursday with Paxton and other state attorneys general who support the lawsuit.
20 states joined the District of Columbia in filing a brief submitted by Democratic officials Thursday in which it endorsed the four states attacked by Texas.
Another 17 states filed a brief Wednesday urging justices to hear the case in presentations by Republican officials. Arizona submitted its own brief indicating interest in the case without explicitly taking sides.
More than 100 Republicans in the United States House of Representatives led by Mike Johnson of Louisiana also presented a brief endorsement of Trump.
“The Supreme Court has an opportunity to save our country from the greatest electoral abuse in the history of the United States,” Trump wrote on Twitter Thursday, repeating his unfounded allegations that the elections were rigged against him.
The Texas lawsuit makes no specific fraud allegations.
Instead, Texas said changes to voting procedures removed protections against fraud and were illegal when the four-state officials or the courts made the reforms without approval from state legislatures.
Democrats and other critics have accused Trump of attempting to reduce public confidence in the integrity of the American election and undermine democracy by attempting to subvert the will of the voters.
A Republican state attorney general, Dave Yost of Ohio, filed a separate brief Thursday in which he disagreed with Texas’ proposal that the votes be thrown out, saying it would “undermine a fundamental premise of our federalist system: the idea that states are sovereign, free to govern themselves ”.
Texas asked the Supreme Court to immediately block the four states from using the voting results to appoint presidential voters to the Electoral College and to allow state legislatures to appoint voters instead of voters reflecting the will of voters.
The four selected states have Republican-led legislatures.
Biden has accumulated 306 electoral votes – exceeding the 270 necessary – compared to Trump’s 232 on the Electoral College state by state that determines the outcome of the election. All four states contribute 62 electoral votes to Biden’s total.
