Texas filed a lawsuit with the US Supreme Court against Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan before midnight on Monday to challenge the election procedures in the four battleground states.
The move was made to ask the Supreme Court to prevent the four states from appointing presidential electors for Joe Biden.
The lawsuit states that the 2020 US Presidential Election "suffered from significant and unconstitutional irregularities" in the four battleground states. It pointed out three major "flaws" that violate federal requirements for elections.
The first is making amendments to duly enacted election laws without state legislature but only through executive actions or courts, which violates the Electors Clause.
The second is having "intrastate differences in the treatment of voters," in which more favor was given to voters in places under Democrat-controlled local governments and in places where there were more Democrats than Republicans. The lawsuit argues this violates the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause.
The third is the "appearance of voting irregularities" in the four swing states, which was reportedly consistent with the relaxed ballot integrity protections in the states' election laws.
The lawsuit also says that some officials in the four states used the pandemic to justify disregarding state laws, particularly about absentee and mail-in voting, from "flooding" the voters with millions of ballot applications to handling the ballots from the time they were received up to the counting of votes.
Such "unconstitutional acts" made the election "less secure" in Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, the lawsuit said. Texas argues that because of these violations, the votes in its own state were "debased."
"Trust in the integrity of our election processes is sacrosanct and binds our citizenry and the States in this Union together," Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement. He also said that the four states "destroyed that trust and compromised the security and integrity of the 2020 election," and that by violating statues enacted by state legislatures, they have violated the Constitution.
"Their failure to abide by the rule of law casts a dark shadow of doubt over the outcome of the entire election. We now ask that the Supreme Court step in to correct this egregious error," Paxton added.
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said in a tweet that the lawsuit is a "huge" move for Texas, as Texas will now have "original jurisdiction to go directly to the Supreme Court."
