The attorneys general of the four battleground states whose presidential election results are being challenged by a Texas lawsuit asked Supreme Court justices on Thursday not to take up the case.
Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin wrote in unusually sharp briefs that hearing out Texas’s unprecedented suit would “disenfranchise millions” of voters and “do violence to the Constitution”.
“What Texas is doing in this proceeding is to ask this court to reconsider a mass of baseless claims about problems with the election that have already been considered, and rejected, by this court and other courts,” Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania attorney general, wrote in a filing to the court.
At the same time, Washington DC attorney general Karl Racine filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of the District of Columbia and 22 states and territories defending the electoral process in the states targeted in the Texas lawsuit.
The letter was issued in response to a long-shot lawsuit filed directly to the Supreme Court by Texas attorney general Ken Paxton. In the suit, Texas accused election officials in the four named battleground states of failing to safeguard mail-in voting against fraud, thereby diminishing “the weight of votes cast in states that lawfully abide by the election structure set forth in the constitution”.
Texas is asking the Supreme Court to block the 62 total electoral college votes in the four states from being counted. All four have already certified their election results.
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Texas’s lawsuit comes on the back of numerous other suits pursued in the four targeted states and elsewhere, alleging widespread election fraud. More than 50 of these suits have been dismissed by judges appointed under Democratic and Republican administrations.
The Supreme Court currently sits at a 6-3 conservative majority, with three conservative justices having been appointed by President Trump.
