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The state Supreme Court on Sunday rejected the request of Republican activists and candidates.
The court, made up exclusively of Republicans, gave no justification. The attempt to get Harris County’s votes rejected will now be heard at an urgent court hearing in federal court on Monday.
“Lawsuits that come up in the middle of an election to disrupt the election must be flatly rejected,” said Harris County Attorney Susan Hays.
Record number of votes
President Donald Trump and Republicans may face the toughest competition from Democrats in decades in Texas.
Harris County is the third largest county in the county and is considered crucial to the outcome of the elections in the state of Texas.
The county has had ten polling stations where the nearly 5 million residents were able to deliver ballots from the car instead of entering the polling station.
Conservative activists have strongly criticized the increased access to early voting in Harris County, where a record 1.4 million votes were cast before Election Day.
– Illegal voting
More than 9.7 million voters have voted in the state, which generally has one of the lowest votes in the United States. The number of early votes has long exceeded the total number of votes in Texas since 2016, with some electoral experts now predicting that the total may exceed 12 million votes.
– We still hope we can stop this illegal form of voting, says attorney Jared Woodfill, who represents the Republicans behind the lawsuits and is the party’s former county leader.
Woodfill believes that state election laws do not explicitly allow voting from the car. It also notes that all but one of the car voting stations are in “democratic parts of the county.”
Open 24 hours
Last week, Harris County tripled the number of polling stations and opened to vote 24 hours a day in eight locations. More than 40 percent of the inhabitants here are of Latin American origin, while one in five is black.
The Texas Supreme Court dismissed an identical lawsuit against drive-thru votes in Harris County last month.
Texas is one of five states that did not allow full mail voting, although the corona pandemic here has claimed more than 18,000 lives. Governor Greg Abbott chose instead to extend the early voting period by one week, and the vast majority of the votes have been cast physically.
Trump won Texas by a total of 9 percentage points in 2016, but opinion polls have shown that Democrat Joe Biden still has some chance of winning. Democrats also only need to win nine seats to regain a majority in the Texas state legislature for the first time in 20 years.
