Texas Sues Four Battleground States for Unconstitutional Voting Rule Changes, Backed by 17 States

(Minghui.org) On December 7, the State of Texas filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Supreme Court against four battleground states, including Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The lawsuit argued that the changes in election procedures in these states violated federal laws, were unfair to voters, and led to severe fraud by loosening measures that are in place to ensure election integrity. Texas thus asked the high court to declare the election results in those four states unconstitutional.

This lawsuit has drawn broad attention from legal experts and average citizens. By December 9, 17 states joined the initiative, including Missouri, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah and West Virginia.

Drafted by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and two aides, this 154-page lawsuit indicated the Electors Clause specified by Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution was violated in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin. 

The Electors Clause requires that only state legislatures can set the rules governing the appointment of electors and elections. Changes in voting rules and procedures by the courts or executive decisions in these states not only violated the legal rights of their state legislatures and undermined voting rights of their residents, but also impaired the voting rights of the plaintiff (Texas) and other states who are loyal to the Constitution.

Furthermore, in those four battleground states, the rules governing the ballot processing and voting procedure were also modified, with variations from county to county, which violated the Equal Protection Clause. 

A similar case occurred in 2000 during the recount dispute in the presidential election in Florida between George W. Bush and Al Gore. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled based on the Equal Protection Clause, allowing Bush to win the election.

“Trust in the integrity of our election processes is sacrosanct and binds our citizenry and the States in this Union together. 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,” said Paxton in a press release on December 8. “Their failure to abide by the rule of law casts a dark shadow of doubt over the outcome of the entire election. We now ask that the Supreme Court step in to correct this egregious error.” 

“Certain officials in the Defendant States presented the pandemic as the justification for ignoring state laws regarding absentee and mail-in voting. The Defendant States flooded their citizenry with tens of millions of ballot applications and ballots in derogation of statutory controls as to how they are lawfully received, evaluated, and counted,” stated the lawsuit. “Whether well intentioned or not, these unconstitutional acts had the same uniform effect—they made the 2020 election less secure in the Defendant States.”

Based on the reasons above, the plaintiff requested that the Supreme Court allow each state legislature to appoint new presidential electors. The votes cast by electors already appointed by the defendants (Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin) should be invalidated since they violated the Electors Clause and the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. 

According to the U.S. Constitution, disputes between two or more states may be resolved by the Supreme Court. In this case, four states were named defendants and the issues concerned are across multiple jurisdictions. The lawsuit is therefore within the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. 

Several hours after docketing the case, the Supreme Court made a request on December 8 for the defendant states to respond by 3 p.m. on December 10.