Texas is challenging the results of the 2020 presidential election in four battleground states, asking the nation’s highest court to throw out the votes and direct state legislatures to appoint presidential electors.
A lawsuit filed Monday in the U.S. Supreme Court by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office argues the administration of the 2020 election in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin violated the Electors Clause and the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution “by taking—or allowing—non-legislative actions to change the election rules that would govern the appointment of presidential electors.”
“Those unconstitutional changes opened the door to election irregularities in various forms,” the complaint reads, alleging each of the states “flagrantly violated constitutional rules governing the appointment of presidential electors.”
The suit alleges a variety of different constitutional violations in each state, all relating to the loosening of mail-ballot processing rules. Some of the changes were implemented by state and local election officials using the Chinese coronavirus as a pretext; others pre-date the presidential election and COVID.
Texas argues the impact of the rule changes was the same in each of these battleground states, saying election officials “flooded their people with unlawful ballot applications and ballots while ignoring statutory requirements as to how they were received, evaluated and counted.”
The requested remedy is also the same: toss out all mail-ballot votes and the presidential election results for all four states, which currently show Joe Biden receiving more votes than President Donald Trump.
To safeguard public legitimacy at this unprecedented moment and restore public trust in the presidential election, this Court should extend the December 14, 2020 deadline for Defendant States’ certification of presidential electors to allow these investigations to be completed.
“Trust in the integrity of our election processes is sacrosanct and binds our citizenry and the States in this Union together,” Paxton said in a press statement. “Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin destroyed that trust and compromised the security and integrity of the 2020 election. The states violated statutes enacted by their duly elected legislatures, thereby violating the Constitution. By ignoring both state and federal law, these states have not only tainted the integrity of their own citizens’ vote, but of Texas and every other state that held lawful elections.”
“Their failure to abide by the rule of law casts a dark shadow of doubt over the outcome of the entire election,” he added. “We now ask that the Supreme Court step in to correct this egregious error.”
Full documents filed by the state can be found here.
