In a novel legal strike, the state of Texas has asked the Supreme Court to invalidate the election results in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia, arguing officials in those four battleground states violated the Constitution by making changes to how ballots were cast and counted without legislative approval.

The lawsuit filed late Monday night by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton asked the justices to issue a temporary restraining order preventing the states “from taking action to certify presidential electors or to have such electors take any official action including without limitation participating in the electoral college.”

The suit argues that changes made by the state’s governors, secretaries of states and election supervisors were “inconsistent with relevant state laws and were made by non-legislative entities, without any consent by the state legislatures. The acts of these officials thus directly violated the Constitution.”

States are allowed in certain circumstances to appeal directly to the Supreme Court, bypassing lower federal courts, in disputes involving other states. Paxton argued the state of Texas was wrongly harmed by the unconstitutional acts of the other states.

“These non-legislative changes … facilitated the casting and counting of ballots in violation of state law, which, in turn, violated the Electors Clause of Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution,” the suit stated. “By these unlawful acts, the Defendant States have not only tainted the integrity of their own citizens vote, but their actions have also debased the votes of citizens in Plaintiff State and other States that remained loyal to the Constitution.”

You can read the full lawsuit here:

Paxton said the defendant states may have had good intentions in making changes to the elections to address COVID-19 but nonetheless violated the Constitution, requiring a dramatic remedy.

“Certain officials in the Defendant States presented the pandemic as the justification for ignoring state laws regarding absentee and mail-in voting,” the suit argued. “The Defendant States flooded their citizenry with tens of millions of ballot applications and ballots in derogation of statutory controls as to how they are lawfully received, evaluated, and counted. Whether well intentioned or not, these unconstitutional acts had the same uniform effect they made the 2020
election less secure in the Defendant States.”

The lawsuit was backed by the Thomas More Society’s Amistad Project, a conservative group that has taken the national lead in challenging election irregularities in 2020. “The lawless nature of the 2020 election is on full display in the suit filed by Texas,” Amistad director Phill Kline said. “There was a coordinated and unprecedented effort of private interests improperly joining with leftist government officials to illegally support the democrat ticket in this election. This involved the sharing of sensitive citizen information with the private sector and the flow of more than $500 million from the private sector to targeted government officials and local governments.”