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Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Back issues
Courthouse News Service Courthouse News Service

Supreme Court Denies Texas Bid to Overturn Election

(CN) — Finding Texas and more than a dozen other red states had no business interfering in the election processes of other states, the Supreme Court on Friday dismissed their request to have the election results from Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia tossed.

“Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections,” the court wrote in a brief unsigned order.

The ruling from the high court, coming just days before the Electoral College meets Monday to formally elect Joe Biden as the nation’s next president, was a stinging rebuke to a long-shot challenge that drew swift condemnation from legal experts but a wide-ranging chorus of support from Republicans in recent days.

In a brief dissent, conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito said they would have allowed the court to hear the case, but would not have granted Texas any other relief.

“In my view, we do not have discretion to deny the filing of a bill of complaint in a case that falls within our original jurisdiction,” Alito wrote, with Justice Thomas joining the statement. “I would therefore grant the motion to file the bill of complaint but would not grant other relief, and I express no view on any other issue.”

The case led by Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was roundly seen as a desperate, last-ditch effort to overturn the will of millions of voters in the four states targeted by the lawsuit.

Those states blasted Paxton’s effort in filings to the high court this week, with Democratic Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro describing the lawsuit as a “seditious abuse of the judicial process.”

Shapiro quickly praised the court’s ruling in a post on Twitter, echoing those same words.

“Our nation’s highest court saw through this seditious abuse of our electoral process,” he wrote. “This swift denial should make anyone contemplating further attacks on our election think twice.”

Paxton responded to the high court’s decision in a statement Friday evening.

“It is unfortunate that the Supreme Court decided not to take this case and determine the constitutionality of these four states’ failure to follow federal and state election law,” he wrote.

The Supreme Court’s refusal to take up the Texas case came just three days after the court also rejected a bid to overturn Pennsylvania’s election results. President Trump had pinned his hopes on the Texas case, calling it “the big one.”

More than 100 House Republicans had pledged their support for the effort as well, claiming that “unconstitutional irregularities” in the November election “cast doubt upon its outcome.”

Despite the Texas case and the flurry of other lawsuits filed by President Trump and his allies over the past month, members of Trump’s own administration have acknowledged that no evidence of widespread fraud in the election exists.

On Nov. 12, a coalition of top federal and state officials plainly rejected the notion of any systemic problems with the election, calling it “the most secure in American history.”

Trump later fired the top federal cybersecurity official who oversaw efforts to review the election’s security.

The president’s own Attorney General William Barr also publicly rejected claims of widespread voter fraud in an interview with the Associated Press earlier this month.

“To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” Barr told the AP.

In an extraordinary statement after the high court rejected the Texas case Friday, the head of the state’s Republican Party seemed to suggest that states opposed to the ruling should secede from the United States.

“Perhaps law-abiding states should bond together and form a Union of states that will abide by the constitution,” Texas GOP Chair Allen West said.

Categories / Appeals, Politics

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