The Supreme Court refused to take a lawsuit from the state of Texas that sought to invalidate the victory of President-elect Joe Biden and the votes of millions of Americans, as legal experts expected.
In a document published by the Court this Friday afternoon, the judges wrote: "The motion of the state of Texas to present a bill is rejected for lack of standing based on Article III of the Constitution. Texas has not shown that has a recognized jurisprudential interest in the way another state conducts its elections. All other pending motions are dismissed as out of the question. "
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed the lawsuit on Monday asking the Court to annul the election result in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, states where outgoing President Donald Trump lost, to allow pending litigation to continue. by the Republican and his allies.
The presentation requested that the Electoral College meeting scheduled for Monday, December 14 be postponed, when they will certify the results of the elections on November 3.
Biden obtained 306 electoral votes and defeated Trump, who obtained 232.
The four states included in the lawsuit add up to 62 Electoral College votes, although legal documents wrongly say there are 72.
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Specifically, Texas was asking the highest court to
invalidate nearly 20 million votes.
For this, the other states harshly criticized the lawsuit in the legal documents that they presented to the Court.
The Supreme Court has not yet released the grounds for its ruling in detail.
But the decision is not a surprise.
Legal specialists had warned that the 154-page lawsuit had a number of problems.
Edward Foley of the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law told our sister network NBC News that
the request was unconstitutional because it is Congress that must decide when voters will meet to vote
and that this must be the same day in the whole country.
The presentation alleged, without showing evidence, that the four states took advantage of the coronavirus pandemic to adopt changes in state electoral laws, thus affecting the results in favor of Biden.
Paxton accused state officials of submitting "illegal" ballot requests and thereby destroying public confidence in the electoral process.
"Texas does not have the right to sue over the election procedures in other states," SCOTUSblog editor Tom Goldstein, a Washington DC attorney who frequently argues in court, had said about it.
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Experts explain that elections in the US are not national, but by state, so
Texas would not have that legal right to claim for what happens in other territories.
"In any case, the judges will think that this case, like the others, should be brought first to the lower courts and not just before them," Goldstein added.
Still, the Texas lawsuit was a compilation of legal claims that have already been analyzed in lower courts.
The lawsuit is a new attempt by Trump to challenge an already lost election, after
state courts have thrown out most of the dozens of complaints
filed by the president and his allies, who have shown no evidence of election fraud.
Attorney General Bill Barr acknowledged last week that they have found no evidence of large-scale fraud that could alter the results (and the president, according to multiple reports, was not at all happy with his prosecutor.
Kira Lerner, editorial director of the VoteBeat group, told Noticias Telemundo on Tuesday that the Texas presentation was "another effort to cast doubt on the electoral process."
Trump filed a motion Wednesday to intervene in the case, along with Republican attorneys general from 17 states.
The demand is "a big one," said the president in a publication on the social network Twitter in which he announced the intervention and assured that the country "needed a victory."
Officials on both sides in the states named in the lawsuit called Paxton's challenge
"a publicity stunt" loaded with "false and irresponsible" allegations,
NBC News reported.
Paxton is a close ally of the president - the Republican campaign named him co-chair of its advocacy groups in July.
The Texas Attorney General has had his own legal troubles.
He was indicted in 2015 on pending securities fraud charges and his top advisers charged him with other wrongdoing this year.
With information from NBC News.
