STATES RAP ‘FAKE’ TEXAS BID TO OVERTURN BIDEN WIN AT SUPREME COURT

Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin on Thursday urged the US Supreme Court to reject a lawsuit filed by Texas and backed by President Donald Trump seeking to undo President-elect Joe Biden’s election victory, saying the case has no factual or legal grounds and offers “bogus” claims, Laurence Hurley reported for Reuters.

“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 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. Trump has falsely claimed he won re-election and has made baseless allegations of widespread voting fraud. State election officials have said they have found no evidence of such fraud. Trump lost to Biden by more than 7 million votes and amassed only 232 Electoral College votes to Biden’s 306.

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 Nov. 3 election. The Republican president won them in the 2016 election. The Texas lawsuit, Shapiro wrote, was adding to a “cacophony of bogus false claims” about the election.