December 8, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — The state of Texas unveiled a new election lawsuit of its own Monday night, asking the United States Supreme Court to void the November election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin on the grounds that all four states acted illegally by expanding mail voting without legislative approval.
The suit, filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, seeks a temporary restraining order to keep states “from taking action to certify presidential electors or to have such electors take any official action including without limitation participating in the electoral college,” Just the News reports.
This year, various states allowed residents to cast ballots by mail without a specific justification, ostensibly on the grounds that COVID-19 made in-person voting too dangerous (despite primary elections earlier in the year not causing infection spikes). But in the four states at issue, Paxton argues, executive officials such as governors and secretaries of state instituted these changes unilaterally “without any consent by the state legislatures” as required by state law.
“These non-legislative changes … facilitated the casting and counting of ballots in violation of state law, which, in turn, violated the Electors Clause of Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution,” the suit argues. “By these unlawful acts, the Defendant States have not only tainted the integrity of their own citizens’ vote, but their actions have also debased the votes of citizens in Plaintiff State and other States that remained loyal to the Constitution.”
As a result, these four states were “flooded” with “tens of millions of ballot applications and ballots in derogation of statutory controls as to how they are lawfully received, evaluated, and counted. Whether well intentioned or not, these unconstitutional acts had the same uniform effect — they made the 2020 election less secure in the Defendant States.”
After vacating the four states’ election results, the lawsuit asks the Supreme Court to “remand to their State legislatures to allocate presidential electors via any constitutional means that does not rely on 2020 election results that includes votes cast in violation of State election statutes in place on Election Day.”
By focusing on a fairly narrow question of law rather than the litany of unsubstantiated fact claims levied by attorneys Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, the Texas lawsuit may stand a better chance of prevailing than the various lawsuits dismissed by lower courts so far.
The prospect of having legislatures decide a presidential winner is a politically-explosive request judges may be reluctant to order whatever the merits may be, but the suit’s reference to “any constitutional means” potentially opens the door to more palatable solutions, such as holding revotes with new limits on mail ballots.
Former Vice President Joe Biden won the election according to the official vote totals, but President Donald Trump has refused to concede, citing widespread reports of vote fraud in several states, and calling the accuracy of those totals into question.