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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump on Wednesday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to allow him to join a remote Texas lawsuit that seeks to reverse its electoral defeat by discarding the results of the vote in four states, litigation that also won the support from 17 other states.
In a court docket, Trump asked to intervene in the Texas lawsuit, the latest litigation to try to undo the victory of Democratic President-elect Joe Biden over the Republican incumbent in the November 3 election. In a separate brief, attorneys from 17 states led by Republican Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt also urged the nine justices to hear the case.
Efforts in court on behalf of Trump to challenge the election results have so far failed.
The lawsuit, announced Tuesday by Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, targeted four states that Trump lost to Biden after winning them in the 2016 election. Trump has falsely claimed he won reelection and made unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud. widespread. Election officials at the state level have said they have found no evidence of such fraud.
Writing on Twitter Wednesday morning, Trump said: “We will intervene in the case of Texas (and many other states). This is the most important. Our country needs a victory!”
Election law experts have said that the Texas lawsuit has little chance of success and lacks legal merit.
“Both procedurally and substantively, it’s a disaster,” Justin Levitt, a professor of electoral law at Loyola Law School in California, said of the Texas lawsuit. “There is no possibility that the court will agree to take the case.”
In addition to Missouri, the states that joined Texas were: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia. All states were represented by Republican officials at the presentation. All but three of the states have Republican governors.
Officials in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have called the lawsuit a reckless attack on democracy. It was filed directly with the Supreme Court rather than a lower court, as is allowed for certain interstate litigation.
The Texas lawsuit argued that changes made by the four states to voting procedures amid the coronavirus pandemic to expand voting by mail were illegal. Texas asked the Supreme Court to immediately block all four states from using the voting results to appoint presidential voters to the Electoral College.
Biden has amassed 306 electoral votes, far more than the 270 needed, compared to the 232 for Trump in the state-by-state Electoral College that determines the outcome of the election. The four states contribute 62 combined electoral votes to Biden’s total.
Texas also asked the Supreme Court to delay the December 14 date for Electoral College votes to be formally cast, a date established by law in 1887.
Democrats and other critics have accused Trump of attempting to reduce public confidence in the integrity of the US elections and undermine democracy by attempting to subvert the will of the voters.
(Reporting by Andrea Shalal and Jan Wolfe; Edited by Tim Ahmann and Will Dunham)
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