Texas election case: What you need to know about the federal lawsuit

Officials in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia have filed ferocious condemnations of the Texas lawsuit in the Supreme Court that seeks to overturn election results in the four key battleground states won by Joe Biden.

The Pennsylvania filing describes the move by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, and supported by Donald Trump, as using a “cacophony of bogus claims” in support of a “seditious abuse of the judicial process”, resting on “a surreal alternate reality”.

State Attorney General Josh Shapiro wrote: “Texas seeks to invalidate elections in four states for yielding results with which it disagrees. Its request for this Court to exercise its original jurisdiction and then anoint Texas's preferred candidate for president is legally indefensible and is an affront to principles of constitutional democracy."

Donald Trump lost the four key states, and the action by Texas is an attempt to invalidate millions of votes, thereby potentially swinging the election to him. The states’ court filings come as 106 Republican lawmakers signed onto the Texas brief in support fo delaying their certification of presidential electors.

The Pennsylvania filing continues: “Texas's effort to get this court to pick the next president has no basis in law or fact. The court should not abide this seditious abuse of the judicial process, and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated.”

In her state’s filing, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel described the challenge as “unprecedented” and “without factual foundation or a valid legal basis". She wrote: “The election in Michigan is over. Texas comes as a stranger to this matter and should not be heard here.”

Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul called the lawsuit an "extraordinary intrusion into Wisconsin's and the other defendant states' elections, a task that the Constitution leaves to each state."

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Attorney general of Georgia Chris Carr concurred and argued that the case does not meet the standard for the court to hear it: “Texas presses a generalised grievance that does not involve the sort of direct state-against-state controversy required for original jurisdiction.”

He continued: "And in any case, there is another forum in which parties who (unlike Texas) have standing can challenge Georgia's compliance with its own election laws: Georgia's own courts."

In addition to the four states named in the lawsuit, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost also filed a legal brief with the Supreme Court on Thursday opposing the Texas lawsuit. Mr Trump won the state of Ohio, and Mr Yost is a Republican.

In his state’s filing Mr Yost wrote that the court lacks the authority to order state legislatures in to appoint presidential electors as is desired by Texas.

“The relief that Texas seeks would undermine a foundational premise of our federalist system: the idea that the states are sovereigns, free to govern themselves,” Mr Yost wrote.

“The courts have no more business ordering the people’s representatives how to choose electors than they do ordering the people themselves how to choose their dinners," he added.

There is a difference between the Ohio filing and the others. Mr Yost encourages the court to rule on whether changes to election laws made by the states to accommodate the realities of the coronavirus pandemic are constitutional or not.

“It is not unreasonable to wonder — and many millions of Americans do — whether those hastily implemented changes exposed the election systems to vulnerabilities,” he wrote.

“It may prove difficult at this late date to fashion a remedy that does not create equal or greater harms,” Mr Yost added. “But there will be an election in 2024, another four years after that, and so on.”

The president and his allies have pursued increasingly desperate legal strategies, mostly based on conspiracy theories, in the weeks since the election.

The Texas lawsuit has been described by Mr Trump as “the big one” that “everyone has been waiting for”.

However, legal experts question whether the case meets the requirements to be addressed by the Supreme Court.

Mr Shapiro wrote: “Whatever the standard, Texas cannot meet it.”

CBS News reports that it was Republican Congressman Mike Johnson of Louisiana, an ally of Mr Trump, that circulated an email to his fellow lawmakers encouraging them to join a brief to be filed in support of the Texas attorney general’s action.

He was joined in his brief by 105 out 196 House Republicans on Thursday, which alleges that “the election of 2020 has been riddled with an unprecedented number of serious allegations of fraud and irregularities,” having been usurped by governors, state courts, and election officials.

One Republican congressman spoke out forcefully against the effort. Chip Roy of Texas called the case led by his own state’s attorney general “a dangerous violation of federalism” that could set a precedent for one state asking federal courts to police the voting procedures of others.