In U.S. Supreme Court Election Case, Texas Trashes Pennsylvania

By Ralph Cipriano
for BigTrial.net  

In case you missed it, the state attorney general of Texas has filed a lawsuit asking the U.S. Supreme Court to declare as unconstitutional the presidential elections held in four battleground states, led by Pennsylvania, because of "rampant lawlessness" in the way those states conducted mail-in voting. 

The gist of the lawsuit is that although the U.S. Constitution gives "plenary" or absolute authority to the state legislatures regarding the appointment of presidential electors, in the four battleground states, elected officials and judges, mostly loyal Democrats, did end runs around the state legislatures, state law, as well as the U.S. Constitution, in illegally blowing out one ballot safeguard after another. 

Leading the way, according to the lawsuit, was "out of control" Pennsylvania, where on Nov. 2nd, the state reported sending out 2.7 million mail ballots, and just two days later, said oops, sorry, the number of ballots we sent out was actually 3.1 million.

"This discrepancy of approximately 400,000 ballots from November 2 to November 4 has not been explained," Ken Paxton, the state attorney general of Texas, a Republican who has some ethical problems of his own, wrote in his lawsuit. "These stunning figures illustrate the out-of-control nature of Pennsylvania’s mail-in balloting scheme."

The lawsuit claims that rampant voting irregularities and myriad "unconstitutional acts" conducted in the states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin not only violated the due process and equal protection clauses in the U.S. Constitution. But those illegal acts, claims the lawsuit cited as Texas v. Pennsylvania, cast a "dark cloud" over this year's election, as well as all future elections.

If you're one of those skeptics who believes something didn't add up about the presidential election, the Texas lawsuit offers some eye-popping numbers to back that up.

According to Pennsylvania's recently certified election results, after President Trump was leading the state at the close of the polls on Election Day by more than 700,000 votes, by the time they counted up all the mail-in votes, Joe Biden won the state by more than 81,000 votes.

"The probability of former Vice President Biden winning the popular vote independently" in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, "given President Trump’s early lead in those States as of 3 a.m. on November 4, 2020, is less than one in a quadrillion, or 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000," the lawsuit states, quoting a deposition from Charles J. Cicchetti, Ph.D. 

"For former Vice President Biden to win these four States collectively, the odds of that event happening decrease to less than one in a quadrillion to the fourth power (i.e., 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,0004)," the lawsuit states.

According to the lawsuit, some 65 million mail-in votes were filed in this year's presidential election, compared to 33.5 million votes in 2016. In the wake of the contested 2000 election between George Bush and Al Gore, the lawsuit states, the "bipartisan Jimmy Carter-James Baker commission identified absentee ballots as 'the largest source of potential voter fraud.'" 

And then came the pandemic. The Texas lawsuit credited Democrats with never letting a good crisis go to waste. 

"Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a justification, government officials in the defendant states of Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania . . . usurped their legislatures’ authority and unconstitutionally revised their state’s election statutes," the lawsuit states. 

"They accomplished these statutory revisions through executive fiat or friendly lawsuits, thereby weakening ballot integrity," the lawsuit states. "Finally, these same government officials flooded the Defendant States with millions of ballots to be sent through the mails, or placed in drop boxes, with little or no chain of custody and, at the same time, weakened the strongest security measures protecting the integrity of the vote—signature verification and witness requirements."

"Presently, evidence of material illegality in the 2020 general elections held in Defendant States grows daily," the lawsuit states. "This Court is the only forum that can delay the deadline for the appointment of presidential electors." 

"To safeguard public legitimacy at this unprecedented moment and restore public trust in the presidential election, this Court should extend the December 14, 2020 deadline for Defendant States’ certification of presidential electors to allow these investigations to be completed."

"This Court should grant leave to file the complaint and, ultimately, enjoin the use of unlawful election results without review and ratification by the Defendant States’ legislatures," the lawsuit states. In Texas v. Pennsylvania, the lawsuit also claims that what Pennsylvania and the other defendant states did amounted to a violation of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Bush v. Gore, which prohibited different standards for ballot tabulation.

And that's certainly what happened in this year's presidential election, when you compare the standards for tabulating mail-in votes in the four blue states, as compared to what happened in red states like Texas. It's another case of separate but equal. 

The lawsuit was filed by Paxton, a Texas Republican with some ethical problems of his own. In 2015, a year after he was elected attorney general, a Texas state grand jury indicted Paxton on two counts of alleged security fraud, and a third count of failing to register with state security regulators, for alleged crimes that took place before Paxton became state attorney general. He's pleaded innocent and the case hasn't come to trial yet.

And then on Oct. 1, seven of Paxton's top aides asked the feds to investigate the state attorney general for alleged improper influence, bribery, and other alleged crimes. Paxton has denied the allegations and attacked the former aides as "rogue employees." He subsequently fired two of them. 

Ok, so when it comes to crusaders, Paxton may not exactly be a knight in shining armor. 

But after the Texas attorney general filed his elections case against Pennsylvania and three other battleground states, 18 attorney generals from states around the country -- all Republicans -- have announced plans to file as intervenors in the case, in support of Paxton's lawsuit. In addition, President Trump, in his personal capacity as a presidential candidate, has joined the ranks of intervenors urging the U.S. Supreme Court to decertify the elections in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Michigan. 

The suit was also joined by 106 Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives, who are urging the U.S. Supreme Court to take up Texas v. Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, 20 Democratic-controlled states have filed as intervenors on behalf of the defendant states. 

In an interview on Thursday with Fox's Maria Bartiromo, Paxton explained how what Pennsylvania did in breaking state and federal laws had a negative effect on Texas voters.

"Because we followed the constitutional provisions for electing our electors and these other states did not, that my voters are now disenfranchised," he said after his office fought a dozen legal attempts in Texas to change the rules of the election. 

"Because we fought so hard to follow state law and make sure that our elections were legitimate," he said, that's why he filed the case. Because "these other states changed all the rules by people who didn't have the authority to change all the rules."

"Our country stands at an important crossroads," the Texas attorney general states in his lawsuit. "Either the Constitution matters and must be followed, even when some officials consider it inconvenient or out of date, or it is simply a piece of parchment on display at the National Archives. We ask the Court to choose the former."

The Texas lawsuit quotes U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch as saying in the case of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, N.Y., vs. Governor Cuomo, “Government is not free to disregard the [Constitution] in times of crisis. ... Yet recently, during the COVID pandemic, certain States seem to have ignored these long-settled principles."

"Each of Defendant States acted in a common pattern. State officials, sometimes through pending litigation (e.g., settling “friendly” suits) and sometimes unilaterally by executive fiat, announced new rules for the conduct of the 2020 election that were inconsistent with existing state statutes defining what constitutes a lawful vote."

"Defendant States also failed to segregate ballots in a manner that would permit accurate analysis to determine which ballots were cast in conformity with the legislatively set rules and which were not. This is especially true of the mail-in ballots in these States," the lawsuit states.

"By waiving, lowering, and otherwise failing to follow the state statutory requirements for signature validation and other processes for ballot security, the entire body of such ballots is now constitutionally suspect and may not be legitimately used to determine allocation of the Defendant States’ presidential electors."

The "rampant lawlessness" in the four states, described in pending lawsuits, include "the physical blocking and kicking out of Republican poll watchers," as well as "thousands of the same ballots run multiple times through tabulators."

The lawsuit mentions some other alleged legal acts: "mysterious late night dumps of thousands of ballots at tabulation centers; illegally backdating thousands of ballots; signature verification procedures ignored; [and] more than 173,000 ballots in the Wayne County, MI center that cannot be tied to a registered voter."

In the lawsuit, the Texas attorney general argued that Pennsylvania acted with "blatant disregard for the rule of law" and "played fast and loose with its promise to the U.S. Supreme Court about the need to segregate late-arriving mail-in ballots. 

"In a classic bait and switch, Pennsylvania used guidance from its Secretary of State to argue that this Court should not expedite review because the State would segregate potentially unlawful ballots," the Texas lawsuit states. "Remarkably, before the ink was dry on the Court’s 4- 4 decision, Pennsylvania changed that guidance, breaking the State’s promise to this Court."

"Pennsylvania’s Secretary of State, Kathy Boockvar, without legislative approval, unilaterally abrogated several Pennsylvania statutes requiring signature verification for absentee or mail-in ballots," the lawsuit states. "Pennsylvania’s legislature has not ratified these changes."

The Pennsylvania Election Code "mandates that, for non-disabled and non-military voters, all applications for an absentee or mail-in ballot 'shall be signed by the applicant,' ” the lawsuit states. In addition, the Pennsylvania state legislature had set a deadline of 8:00 p.m. on Election Day for a county board of elections to receive a mail-in ballot. 

But acting under a generally worded clause that “Elections shall be free and equal," the Texas lawsuit states, the Democratic-controlled Pennsylvania state Supreme Court "extended that deadline to three days after Election Day and adopted a presumption that even non-postmarked ballots were presumptively timely."

Requests for absentee ballots in Pennsylvania were split 70 percent for Biden, and 25 percent for Trump, the lawsuit states. 

Another problem: prior to the election, "Secretary Boockvar sent an email to local election officials urging them to provide opportunities for various persons — including political parties — to contact voters to “cure” defective mail-in ballot," the Texas lawsuit states. "This process clearly violated several provisions of the state election code."

The state election code states that county board of elections should keep mail in ballots in "sealed, official mail-in ballot envelopes," and well as to "safely keep the ballots in sealed or locked containers until they are to be canvassed by the county board of elections.”

State election law also specifies that county election officials weren't supposed to look at ballots “no earlier than seven o’clock a.m. on election day.” The hour for a “pre-canvas” was supposed to be publicly announced at least 48 hours in advance," before the votes were counted on election day."

None of this was done, the Texas attorney general contends. 

"By removing the ballots for examination prior to seven o’clock a.m. on election day, Secretary Boockvar created a system whereby local officials could review ballots without the proper announcements, observation, and security," the lawsuit states. "This entire scheme, which was only followed in Democrat majority counties, was blatantly illegal in that it permitted the illegal removal of ballots from their locked containers prematurely."

"Absentee and mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania were thus evaluated under an illegal standard regarding signature verification. It is now impossible to determine which ballots were properly cast and which ballots were not."

"In addition, a great number of ballots were received after the statutory deadline and yet were counted by virtue of the fact that Pennsylvania did not segregate all ballots received after 8:00 pm on November 3, 2020," the lawsuit states. "Boockvar’s claim that only about10,000 ballots were received after this deadline has no way of being proven since Pennsylvania broke its promise to the [U.S. Supreme] Court to segregate ballots and co-mingled perhaps tens, or even hundreds of thousands, of illegal late ballots."

The Texas lawsuit quotes a Dec. 4th report written by 15 members of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives led by Rep. Francis X. Ryan, about the state's presidential election being "fraught with inconsistencies, documented irregularities and improprieties associated with mail-in balloting, pre-canvassing, and canvassing."

Because of those defects, "the reliability of the mail-in votes in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is impossible to rely upon," the Ryan report concluded. 

The Ryan report found:

-- 9,005 ballots with no mailed-in date.

-- 58,221 ballots returned on or before the mailed-in date. 

-- 51,200 ballots returned a day after the mail-in date. 

"These nonsensical numbers alone total 118,426 ballots and exceed Mr. Biden’s margin of 81,660 votes over President Trump," the Texas law suit states.

"This blatant disregard of statutory law renders all mail-in ballots constitutionally tainted and cannot form the basis for appointing or certifying Pennsylvania’s presidential electors to the Electoral College," the Texas lawsuit concludes.