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The United States Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected Republicans’ latest attempt to overturn Pennsylvania’s certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory on the electoral battlefield.
The court without comment declined to question the certification process in Pennsylvania.
There was no noted dissent from the tribunal’s judges, which has a 6-3 Conservative majority, including three appointed by President Donald Trump. The president had urged the Republican-led Senate to confirm its final candidate, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, before the election so that she can participate in all election-related matters.
Pennsylvania Democratic Governor Tom Wolf has already certified Biden’s victory and the state’s 20 voters are due to meet on December 14 to vote for Biden.
Biden won 306 electoral votes, so even if Pennsylvania’s results were in doubt, he would still have more than the 270 electoral votes needed to become president.
Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly of Northwestern Pennsylvania and other plaintiffs pleaded with justices to intervene after the state’s Supreme Court dismissed their case.
Republicans have argued that Pennsylvania’s extensive mail-in ballot law is unconstitutional because it required a constitutional amendment to authorize its provisions.
Biden defeated President Donald Trump by more than 80,000 votes in Pennsylvania, a state Trump won in 2016. Most of the mail-in ballots were submitted by Democrats.
The state’s high court said plaintiffs had waited too long to file the challenge and noted Republicans’ staggering demand that an entire election be overturned.
In the underlying lawsuit, Kelly and the other Republican plaintiffs had sought to either reject the 2.5 million mail-in ballots submitted under the law or to erase the election results and order the controlled legislature by state Republicans to choose Pennsylvania presidential voters.
Meanwhile, the state of Texas on Tuesday asked the United States Supreme Court to dismiss the results of the vote in four other states in a lengthy legal gambit intended to help Trump reverse his electoral defeat to Biden.
Officials from all four states – Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – called the lawsuit a reckless attack on American democracy when legal experts gave it little chance of success. The case was filed directly with the Supreme Court rather than a lower court, as is permitted in some interstate disputes.
The lawsuit, announced by Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, targeted the electoral battlefield, says Trump lost to Biden after winning them in 2016. The Republican president falsely claimed he was reelected and made unsubstantiated allegations of widespread electoral fraud. .
While judges are not required to hear the case, the court has added the case to its role.
“There is normally no specific timeline for the court to act in such cases, but Paxton says the state will seek to expeditiously consider his claim,” US Supreme Court newspaper SCOTUSblog said. , reported.
Paul Smith, professor and electoral law expert at Georgetown University Law School, told Reuters news agency Texas did not have a legitimate basis for the trial.
“The state of Texas has no way of complaining about how other states counted the votes and how they are about to vote,” Smith said.
The case represents the latest in a series of lawsuits brought by the Trump campaign and his supporters aimed at reversing the Republican President’s loss to Democrat Biden in the November 3 election. These efforts have so far failed.
The lawsuit argued that changes made by the four states to voting procedures amid the coronavirus pandemic to expand postal voting were illegal. Texas is making the supreme court’s remarkable request to immediately prevent the four states from using the results of the vote to nominate presidential voters to the Electoral College, essentially erasing the will of the voters.
Electoral college voters are typically party loyalists who have pledged to vote for the candidate that wins a state’s popular vote. Texas wants the legislatures of all four states to name their own voters lists instead of relying on the verdict of the voters.
Texas has also asked the Supreme Court to postpone the Dec. 14 date for the Electoral College vote. This date was set by law in 1887.
Democrats and other critics have accused Trump of wanting to reduce public confidence in U.S. electoral integrity and undermine democracy by trying to overthrow the will of voters.
“The erosion of trust in our democratic system is not attributable to the good people of Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia or Pennsylvania, but rather to partisan officials, like Mr. Paxton, who place loyalty in a person rather than loyalty to their country, ”said Michigan’s Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel.
Paxton, a Trump ally on a range of issues, faces allegations in Texas of corruption and abuse of his office for the benefit of a political donor and, according to reports, is under investigation by the FBI.
Trump retweeted several Twitter messages expressing his support for the trial, including two calling on other states to join him.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, said, “These continued attacks on our fair and free electoral system are beyond merit, recklessness. Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul, a Democrat, called the trial “really embarrassing” and “an attack on our democracy.”
A spokeswoman for the Georgia Attorney General’s Office said, “With all due respect, the Texas Attorney General is constitutionally, legally and factually wrong about Georgia.” Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr is a Republican.
Tuesday represents a “safe harbor”Anticipated statutory delay for states to certify election results.
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