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Op-Ed: State of Texas Lawsuit Against Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia Is A Very Simple Case, And It’s The Case of The Century

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Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress; but no Senator or Representative, or person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States shall be appointed an Elector.
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress; but no Senator or Representative, or person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States shall be appointed an Elector.

WEST PALM BEACH, FL – By now you have probably heard that the State of Texas is suing the four states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia. The case is based on alleged violations of the U.S. constitution. Specifically, the case hinders on whether these four states circumvented proper law and procedure when it comes to restrictions on mail-in balloting placed by the Legislature – restrictions that can only be lifted or changed by that same Legislature. The case claims that the states changed their laws due to the pandemic, by senior state officials and while doing so circumventing the Legislative process.

Many news and media companies will have you believe that this case lacks merit, does not have a chance – or that it is going nowhere. Some will even try to make you think its filer, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is crazy, yet that was before it was officially put on the Docket of the Supreme Court, and the high court yesterday ruled that the defendant states must respond to the lawsuit by 3PM today.

Article 2 Section 1 of the Constitution:

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress; but no Senator or Representative, or person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States shall be appointed an Elector.

I believe it would be sound advice if you were to listen to the mainstream media a little less, and did your own research and reading a little more. There is literally no better way to understand the lawsuit then to read the position of the writer and the text itself. Below is the actual complaint, as it was written to the high court. The hyperlinks are those footnoted in the suit as supporting facts.

This is one of the most significant cases of the century. As President Trump notes, this is the big one.

Our Country is deeply divided in ways that it arguably has not been seen since the election of 1860. There is a high level of distrust between the opposing sides, compounded by the fact that, in the election just held, election officials in key swing states, for apparently partisan advantage, failed to conduct their state elections in compliance with state election law, in direct violation of the plenary power that Article II of the U.S. Constitution confers on the Legislatures of the States.

Indeed, a recent poll by the reputable Rasmussen polling firm indicates that 47% of all Americans (including 75% of Republicans and 30% of Democrats), believe that it is “likely” or “very likely” the election was stolen from the current incumbent President.

The fact that nearly half of the country believes the election was stolen should come as no surprise. President Trump prevailed on nearly every historical indicia of success in presidential elections. For example, he won both Florida and Ohio; no candidate in history—Republican or Democrat—has ever lost the election after winning both States. And he won these traditional swing states by large margins—Ohio by 8 percentage points and 475,660 votes; Florida by 3.4 percentage points and 371,686 votes. He won 18 of the country’s 19 so-called “bellwether” counties—counties whose vote, historically, almost always goes for the candidate who wins the election.

Initial analysis indicates that he won 26 percent of non-white voters, the highest percentage for any Republican candidate since 1960, a fairly uniform national trend that was inexplicably not followed in key cities and counties in the Defendant States. And he had coattails but, as some commentators have cleverly noted, apparently no coat. That is, Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate and U.S. House, down to Republican candidates and the state and local level, all out-performed expectations and won in much larger numbers than predicted, yet the candidate for President at the top of the ticket who provided those coattails did not himself get over his finish line in first place. This, despite the fact that the nearly 75 million votes he received—a record for any incumbent President—was nearly 12 million more than he received in the 2016 election, also a record (in contrast to the 2012 election, in which the incumbent received 3 million fewer votes than he had four years earlier but nevertheless prevailed). These things just don’t normally happen, and a large percentage of the American people know that something is deeply amiss.

This Court adjudicates cases arising under the Constitution and laws of the United States, of course. It does not decide elections. That is the role of voters who cast lawful ballots. But the Constitution does contain rules that are obligatory on all agents of government—including those who conduct elections. When election officials conduct elections in a manner that contravenes of the Constitution of the United States, grave harm is done not just to the candidates on the ballot but to the citizenry’s faith in the election process itself.

In the 2020 election, under the guise of responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, election officials in several key states, sometimes on their own and sometimes in connection with court actions brought by partisan advocates, made a systematic effort to weaken measures to ensure fair and impartial elections by creating new rules for the conduct of the elections—rules that were never approved by the legislatures of the defendant states as required by Article II of the United States Constitution. These new rules were aimed at weakening, ignoring, or overriding provisions of state law that are aimed at ensuring the integrity of the voting process.

As more particularly alleged in the Bill of Complaint filed by the State of Texas, for the first time in history, these officials flooded their States with millions of ballots sent through the mail, or placed in drop boxes, with little or no chain of custody and, at the same time, intentionally weakened or eliminated the few existing security measures protecting the integrity of the vote—signature verification and witness requirements.

For example, Pennsylvania’s Secretary of State issued guidance purporting to suspend the signature verification requirements, in direct violation of state law. In Michigan, the Secretary of State illegally flooded the state with absentee ballot applications mailed to every registered voter despite the fact that state law strictly limits the ballot application process. In Wisconsin, the largest cities all deployed hundreds of unmanned, unsecured absentee ballot drop boxes that were all invalid means of returning absentee votes under state law. In Georgia, the Secretary of State instituted a series of unlawful policies, including processing ballots weeks before election day and destructively revising signature and identity verification procedures.

In all cases, absentee ballots were mailed to people without even a perfunctory attempt to verify the recipient’s identity or eligibility to vote, including residency, citizenship, and criminal records. When returned and counted, the ballots were typically separated from their security envelopes, divorcing them from any information that could have helped determine whether the votes were legally cast.

The effort to weaken ballot security measures did not merely arise in an atmosphere of chaos of an election arising in a global pandemic. There was a nationwide campaign to weaken ballot security and integrity through over three hundred lawsuits filed by partisan operatives in the months and weeks prior to the 2020 election.

To the extent these drastic and fraud-inducing changes in state election law were done without the consent of the state legislature, the federal constitution was violated. Article II provides that only state legislatures can make rules for presidential elections. Election officials—either on their own or in cooperation with courts—cannot change the rules either weeks in advance or in the midst of the election process. This is no mere procedural requirement. For without compliance with the rule of law, elections are subject to the very real prospect that fraud could occur in the election.

Leaving ballot boxes in public parking lots invites fraud. And when the traditional rules for validating voter signatures and identity are waived, overruled, or ignored, the opportunity for fraud is greatly increased. And when the most common method of detecting fraud—comparing signatures of voters with their registration documents—is ignored, or envelopes are destroyed, proof of the fraud becomes extremely difficult.

The unlawful actions of election officials effectively destroy the evidence by which the fraud may be detected. It is not necessary for the Plaintiff in Intervention to prove that fraud occurred, however; it is only necessary to demonstrate that the elections in the defendant States materially deviated from the “manner” of choosing electors established by their respective state Legislatures.

By failing to follow the rule of law, these officials put our nation’s belief in elected self-government at risk. This Court should issue a declaratory judgment that the defendant States have violated the Constitution and the rights of the Plaintiff in Intervention by conducting the elections according to unauthorized rules created by officials and courts rather than by the pre-existing requirements of state law. And it should further direct the defendant States to review their election results in compliance with pre-existing state law and count only lawfully cast ballots and thereby determine who truly won the contest for President of the United States.

Only then will the public’s faith in the election process be restored, and only then will voters on either side of the intensely partisan divide be able to find solace in a result that was obtained after a fair electoral fight, where every legal vote was counted but where those votes were not diluted or negated by the casting and counting of illegal votes.

What’s both different and notable about this lawsuit is that it doesn’t need to prove that fraud actually took place which without the envelopes with signatures would be virtually impossible to do. It only needs to prove that election laws set by the legislature were not followed which clearly they were not. 

Again, the case must prove just one very simple fact; did the four states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia, in-fact, as alleged in the complaint, change the rules of the road when it came to accepting and processing mail-in ballots, without the approval of Legislature? If in the event they did, they violated the constitution in doing so, and Texas, like many other states in nation were harmed.

The case can be read in its entirety here.

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