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Texas v. Pennsylvania (view source)
Revision as of 22:26, February 8, 2021
, 22:26, February 8, 2021Added to page
*[[Ohio]]
*[[Ohio]]
*A group of 24 Pennsylvania Republican state senators
*A group of 24 Pennsylvania Republican state senators
==Plaintiffs' Arguments==
The 42-page bill of complaint within the filing contained the bulk of the arguments made by the State of Texas and the supporting amici. Rather than trying to prove voter "fraud" as such, the case rested more on a [[separation of powers]] argument, arguing that government officials in the four states in question usurped the authority of the state legislatures to revise statutes regulating the election process. Not only was this unconstitutional in and of itself, the plaintiffs went on to point out the election results engineered by such actions, since they were part of a federal election, affected every other state in turn. "Voters who cast lawful ballots," the suit stated, "cannot have their votes diminished by states that administered their 2020 presidential elections in a manner where it is impossible to distinguish a lawful ballot from an unlawful ballot." Since all states were the injured parties, it went on, the individual state governments could not simply be left to clean up their own problems; the Supreme Court had original jurisdiction and therefore must intervene.
The plaintiffs noted further that there was already some precedent for the Court intervening in such state-level controversies, as earlier in 2020, during the [[coronavirus]] pandemic, it had rejected the attempts of some state executives to impose restrictions on religious organizations, using the pandemic as a justification. Moreover, Justices [[Neil Gorsuch]] and [[Samuel Alito]] had previously spoken out against the arbitrary altering of established rules during a crisis more abstractly.
The suit then examined the facts of the case in each of the four states in turn. Though specific conditions varied from one to the other, it alleged that there were at least four commonalities in each offending state:
* The decision of state executives to drastically expand absentee and mail-in voting created "a massive opportunity for fraud";
* The defendant states had made it impossible to separate the legal mail-in ballots from the illegal ones (in the case of Pennsylvania, in direct defiance of an order from the Court to do so);
* Each state had significantly weakened its security measures against fraud, despite knowing such a large influx of absentee and mail-in ballots heightened the risk of fraud occurring; and
* The counting of unlawful ballots in each state occurred on a scale greater, perhaps far greater, than the difference in total votes between Trump and Biden.
==References==
==References==