States targeted in Texas election fraud lawsuit
condemn 'cacophony of bogus claims'
Attorneys general from both parties reject baseless
allegations in case filed with US supreme court
Guardian
staff and agencies
Fri 11 Dec
2020 00.03 GMT
Georgia,
Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin on Thursday urged the US supreme court to
reject a lawsuit filed by Texas and backed by Donald Trump seeking to undo Joe
Biden’s victory, saying the case has no factual or legal grounds and makes
“bogus” claims.
“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 longshot suit against the four election battleground states on Tuesday
directly with the supreme court. It asked 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.
On Thursday
afternoon, more than 100 Republican members of the House filed an amicus brief
with the court in support of the Texas lawsuit.
Trump’s
campaign and his allies already have been spurned in numerous lawsuits in state
and federal courts challenging the election results. Legal experts have said
the Texas lawsuit has little chance of succeeding and have questioned whether
Texas has the legal standing to challenge election procedures in other states.
Biden, a
Democrat, defeated Trump in the four states in the 3 November election. The Republican
president won them in the 2016 election.
Local,
state and national election officials declared November’s election the most
secure in American history but the Trump campaign continues to push to overturn
the result, baselessly claiming widespread fraud across the country.
The Texas
lawsuit, Shapiro wrote on Thursday, was adding to a “cacophony of bogus false
claims” about the election.
Dana
Nessel, Michigan’s Democratic attorney general, listed the many cases filed in
that state that Trump and his backers have lost.
“The
challenge here is an unprecedented one, without factual foundation or a valid
legal basis,” Nessel wrote in Michigan’s filing.
Chris Carr,
Georgia’s Republican attorney general, said Texas could not show it had been
harmed by the election results in other states.
“The novel
and far-reaching claims that Texas asserts, and the breathtaking remedies it
seeks, are impossible to ground in legal principles and unmanageable,” Carr
wrote in Georgia’s filing.
Josh Kaul,
Wisconsin’s Democratic attorney general, noted that 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,” Kaul wrote in Wisconsin’s filing.
Trump filed
a motion with the court on Wednesday asking the 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.
Trump met
on Thursday with Paxton and other state attorneys general who support the suit.
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 filed a brief urging the justices to hear the case in
filings by Republican officials. Arizona filed its own brief signaling an
interest in the case without explicitly taking sides.
Then the
more than 100 Republican House members, led by Mike Johnson of Louisiana, also
filed a friend of the court brief backing Trump.
“The
Supreme Court has a chance to save our Country from the greatest Election abuse
in the history of the United States,” Trump wrote on Twitter on Thursday,
repeating his unfounded allegations that the election was rigged against him.
The Texas
lawsuit does not make specific fraud allegations. Instead, Texas said changes
to voting procedures removed protections against fraud and were unlawful when the
reforms were made by officials in the four states or courts without the
approval of the states’ legislatures.
Democrats
and other critics have accused Trump of aiming to reduce public confidence in
US election integrity and undermine democracy by trying to subvert the will of
the voters.
One
Republican state attorney general, Dave Yost of Ohio, filed a separate brief on
Thursday disagreeing with the Texas proposal that votes be tossed out, saying
that it “would undermine a foundational premise of our federalist system: the
idea that the States are sovereigns, free to govern themselves”.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário