Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall Wednesday signed on to a brief in support of a lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that asks the U.S. Supreme Court to toss election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
“The unconstitutional actions and fraudulent votes in other states not only affect the citizens of those states, they affect the citizens of all states — of the entire United States,” Marshall said in a statement he tweeted on Tuesday. “Every unlawful vote counted, or lawful vote uncounted, debase and dilute citizens’ free exercise of the franchise.”
Paxton’s lawsuit seeks to overturn the results in those four key battleground states, which Trump lost to President-elect Joe Biden. It follows dozens of lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign and supporters seeking to overturn the results, which so far have not been successful.
Judges, in numerous such lawsuits, have tossed them, citing baseless claims of voter fraud or a lack of any evidence of misdeeds.
Paxton’s lawsuit seeks to toss those results, which would allow those state Legislatures, all Republican-led, to send a new slate of electors to the Electoral College, possibly opening the door for a Trump victory.
Such a legal gambit is a long shot, however. The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected an attempt by Pennsylvania Republicans to overturn that state’s results.
Biden defeated Trump by a margin of 306 to 232 electoral college votes — the same margin Trump won by in 2016 — and received 7 million more votes than Trump nationwide. In Pennsylvania and Michigan, Biden won by larger margins than Trump in 2016.
APR contacted Marshall’s office Wednesday morning for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt in his brief alleges “unconstitutional encroachments on the authority of state Legislatures” in those battleground states and that “non-Legislative actors repeatedly stripped away the statutory safeguards that the ‘Legislature thereof’ had enacted to protect against fraud in voting by mail.”
In numerous states — Alabama and Texas included — “non-legislative actors” made changes to make voting during the COVID-19 pandemic safer and easier.
Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill changed voting procedures for the Nov. 3 election, allowing anyone who felt they needed to do so to vote by absentee. Merrill did not seek Legislative approval to do so but has said that Alabama law gave him the authority to make those changes, therefore the changes were legal.
In Texas, the state asking the Supreme Court to intervene in this matter, Gov. Greg Abbot, through an executive order and without Legislative approval, extended early voting by allowing it to begin a week earlier.
Several Texas Republicans sued, alleging Abbot defied state election laws through his executive order, but seven of eight of the state’s Supreme Court Justices disagreed and ruled in favor of the governor.
