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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The state of Texas, aiming to help President Donald Trump change the results of the US elections, said Tuesday it has sued Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in the Supreme Court, calling the changes that those states made the electoral procedures. amid the illegal coronavirus pandemic.
The risky lawsuit, announced by Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, was being filed directly with the Supreme Court rather than a lower court, as is allowed for certain interstate litigation. The Supreme Court has a 6-3 conservative majority, including three Trump-appointed justices.
The lawsuit represents the latest legal effort aimed at reversing the Republican president’s defeat to Democratic President-elect Joe Biden in the Nov. 3 election. Those efforts have so far failed, and legal experts said the Texas lawsuit is unlikely to be successful.
Democrats and other critics have accused Trump of trying to reduce public confidence in the integrity of American elections and undermine American democracy by trying to subvert the will of the voters.
Texas accused election officials in all four states of failing to protect vote-by-mail from fraud, thus lowering “the weight of votes cast in states that legally comply with the electoral structure established in the Constitution.”
State officials have said they have found no evidence of such fraud that changes the results. There was an increase in voting by mail due to the pandemic, as many Americans stayed away from polling places to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
Texas is asking the Supreme Court to block the Electoral College vote counting in all four states, a total of 62 votes. Biden has amassed 306 electoral votes, surpassing the 270 needed, compared to Trump’s 232 in the state-by-state Electoral College that determines the outcome of the elections, while winning the national popular vote by more than 7 million votes.
Texas is also asking the Supreme Court to delay the December 14 date for Electoral College votes to be cast. That date was set by law in 1887.
The Supreme Court is not required to hear the case and has said in previous decisions that its “original jurisdiction”, which allows it to directly hear inter-state litigation, should be invoked sparingly.
Paul Smith, professor and electoral law expert at Georgetown University School of Law, said Texas had no legitimate basis for the lawsuit.
“There is no possible way that the state of Texas has the right to complain about how other states counted the votes and how they are about to cast their electoral votes,” Smith said.
Additionally, election disputes must be resolved by members of Congress when they meet on Jan. 6 to formally count Electoral College votes, said constitutional law professor Ned Foley of the Ohio State University Moritz School of Law.
“I think the court would not want to be dragged into the middle of this,” Foley added.
Paxton has been a Trump ally on a variety of issues, and the Trump administration joined a case he led to invalidate the affordable health care law when it reached the United States Supreme Court this year.
‘PUBLICITY STUNT’
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, Democrat, in a statement called the lawsuit “a publicity stunt, not a serious legal claim.”
“The erosion of trust in our democratic system cannot be attributed to the good people of Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia or Pennsylvania, but to partisan officials, such as Mr. Paxton, who put loyalty to a person before loyalty to his country, “Nessel said. additional.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, said: “These ongoing attacks on our free and fair election system are more than unfounded, more than reckless.”
A spokeswoman for the Georgia attorney general’s office said: “With all due respect, the Texas attorney general is constitutionally, legally and factually wrong about Georgia.” Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr is a Republican.
Tuesday represents an early “safe harbor” deadline under law for states to certify election results.
The Trump campaign and its supporters have filed unsuccessful lawsuits in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and other states, making unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud. Trump lost those four states after winning them in 2016.
United States Attorney General Bill Barr said last week that the Justice Department has found no evidence of voter fraud on a scale that would have changed the outcome of the election.
(Reporting by Makini Brice, Jan Wolfe, and Lawrence Hurley in Washington; Additional reporting by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware; Editing by Will Dunham and Noeleen Walder)
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