Legal experts have shredded an audacious new lawsuit challenging the results of America’s presidential election in four swing states, calling it the “craziest” and “dumbest” case of the entire post-election period.
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In his filing, Mr Paxton argues the states in question “exploited the COVID-19 pandemic” to enact “last-minute changes” to their electoral rules, “skewing” the outcome of the election.
The full motion, which you can read
here, contains many of the same allegations that have already been thrown out of state and federal court across the country.
It also includes some rather striking claims of its own.
For example, Mr Paxton argues the probability that Mr Biden could have won the popular vote in all four of the defendant states, given Mr Trump’s early lead in them “as of 3am on November 4”, was “less than one in a quadrillion, or 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000”.
He cites “expert analysis using a commonly accepted statistical test”.
As we have
explained at some length before, Mr Trump leapt to early leads in the states Mr Paxton refers to because it took longer to count the votes in heavily Democratic areas, which were more populous and much more likely to have a large number of mail-in votes.
The Trump campaign says Mr Biden’s comebacks in Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania were due to widespread fraud.
It has yet to convince a single judge that there is actually any evidence to support that claim, resulting in dozens of court defeats and a series of withering judgments.
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Fighting words, to be sure, but they did not impress legal experts, who expressed severe doubts that the court would even agree to hear Mr Paxton’s case.
Rick Hasen, an election law expert and professor at the University of California,
said Mr Paxton’s lawsuit may have replaced
the one filed by Congressman Mike Kelly in Pennsylvania as “the dumbest case I’ve ever seen filed on an emergency basis at the Supreme Court”.
“This is a press release masquerading as a lawsuit,” Prof Hasen said.
“Texas doesn’t have standing to raise these claims as it has no say over how other states choose electors; it could raise these issues in other cases and does not need to go straight to the Supreme Court; it waited too late to sue; the remedy Texas suggests of disenfranchising tens of millions of voters after the fact is unconstitutional; there’s no reason to believe the voting conducted in any of the states was done unconstitutionally; it’s too late for the Supreme Court to grant a remedy even if the claims were meritorious (they are not).
“What utter garbage. Dangerous garbage, but garbage.”
He noted that Texas’s Solictor General Kyle Hawkins, whose job it is to supervise and conduct the state’s litigation in the Supreme Court, had not put his name on the lawsuit, surmising that Mr Hawkins “surely would not sign this garbage”.
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Prominent Texas appellate lawyer Raffi Melkonian kept his assessment brief.
“The new Paxton lawsuit is not worth a lot of your time, but I mean, it doesn’t make any sense and is bad and has no chance of success at all. Just want to be clear on that,”
Mr Melkonian said.
Finally, Eugene Mazo from the Louis D. Brandeis School of Law told
Law & Crime Mr Paxton’s lawsuit was
the “craziest case” of the post-election period.
“This is the dumbest case any lawyer has ever seen, and the Supreme Court won’t touch it. Really, this is the craziest case of them all. Unbelievable,” Prof Mazo said.
“It’s just unbelievable to any sane, normal person who understands the structure of our constitutional system and how it functions.”
