Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have urged the US Supreme Court to throw out a lawsuit filed by Texas and backed by President Donald Trump seeking to undo President-elect Joe Biden’s election victory.
“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’s Democratic attorney-general, wrote in a filing to the nine justices.
Texas filed the long-shot suit against the four election battleground states on Tuesday (local time) directly with the Supreme Court.
It asks that the voting results in those states be thrown out because of their changes in voting procedures that allowed expanded mail-in voting during the coronavirus pandemic.
Mr Trump’s campaign and his allies already have been spurned in numerous lawsuits in state and federal courts challenging the election results.
Legal experts say the Texas lawsuit has little chance of succeeding and have questioned whether Texas has the legal standing to challenge election procedures in other states.
Mr Biden, a Democrat, defeated Mr Trump in the four states, which the Republican president had won in the 2016 election.
The Texas lawsuit, Mr Shapiro wrote, was adding to a “cacophony of bogus false claims” about the election.
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Josh Kaul, Wisconsin’s Democratic Attorney-General, noted that Mr Trump already had obtained recounts in the two most heavily Democratic counties in the state, showing no problems with the results.
“There has been no indication of any fraud, or anything else that would call into question the reliability of the election results,” Mr Kaul wrote.
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Chris Carr, Georgia’s Republican attorney-general, noted like his counterparts that Texas could not show it has been harmed by the election results in other states.
Mr Trump filed a motion with the court on Wednesday asking the nine justices to let him intervene and become a plaintiff in the suit filed by Ken Paxton, the Republican attorney-general of Texas and an ally of the president. Mr Trump on Thursday met Mr Paxton and other state attorneys-general who support the suit.
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Twenty states joined the District of Columbia in filing a brief lodged by Democratic officials on Thursday backing the four states targeted by Texas. Seventeen other states on Wednesday urged the Supreme Court to hear the case in filings by Republican officials.
Mr Trump has falsely claimed he won re-election and has made baseless allegations of widespread voting fraud.
“The Supreme Court has a chance to save our Country from the greatest Election abuse in the history of the United States,” Mr Trump wrote on Twitter on Thursday.
-with agencies
