Don’t Mess with Texas! Texas Sues Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin at the Supreme Court

“[T]hat form of government which is best contrived to secure an impartial and exact execution of the law, is the best of republics.”
—John Adams

BILL OF COMPLAINT

Our Country stands at an important crossroads. Either the Constitution matters and must be followed, even when some officials consider it inconvenient or out of date, or it is simply a piece of parchment on display at the National Archives.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.

Lawful elections are at the heart of our constitutional democracy. The public, and indeed the candidates themselves, have a compelling interest in ensuring that the selection of a President—any President—is legitimate. If that trust is lost, the American Experiment will founder. A dark cloud hangs over the 2020 Presidential election.

Here is what we know. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a justification, government officials in the defendant states of Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (collectively, “Defendant States”), usurped their legislatures’ authority and unconstitutionally revised their state’s election statutes. They accomplished these statutory revisions through executive fiat or friendly lawsuits, thereby weakening ballot integrity. 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 custodyⁱ 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. And, to be sure, the two presidential candidates who have garnered the most votes have an interest in assuming the duties of the Office of President without a taint of impropriety threatening the perceived legitimacy of their election. However, 3 U.S.C. § 7 requires that presidential electors be appointed on December 14, 2020. That deadline, however, should not cement a potentially illegitimate election result in the middle of this storm—a storm that is of the Defendant States’ own making by virtue of their own unconstitutional actions.

This Court is the only forum that can delay the deadline for the appointment of presidential electors under U.S.C. §§ 5, 7. 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. Should one of the two leading candidates receive an absolute majority of the presidential electors’ votes to be cast on December 14, this would finalize the selection of our President. The only date that is mandated under the Constitution, however, is January 20, 2021. U.S. CONST. amend. XX.

Against that background, the State of Texas (“Plaintiff State”) brings this action against Defendant States based on the following allegations:

NATURE OF THE ACTION

1.         Plaintiff State challenges Defendant States’ administration of the 2020 election under the Electors Clause of Article II, Section 1, Clause 2, and the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

2.         This case presents a question of law: Did Defendant States violate the Electors Clause (or, in the alternative, the Fourteenth Amendment) by taking—or allowing—non-legislative actions to change the election rules that would govern the appointment of presidential electors?

3.         Those unconstitutional changes opened the door to election irregularities in various forms. Plaintiff State alleges that each of the Defendant States flagrantly violated constitutional rules governing the appointment of presidential electors. In doing so, seeds of deep distrust have been sown across the country. In the spirit of Marbury v. Madison, this Court’s attention is profoundly needed to declare what the law is and to restore public trust in this election.

4.         As Justice Gorsuch observed recently, “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.” Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, New York v. Cuomo, 592 U.S. ____ (2020) (Gorsuch, J., concurring). This case is no different.

5.         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.

6.         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. 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.

7.         The rampant lawlessness arising out of Defendant States’ unconstitutional acts is described in a number of currently pending lawsuits in Defendant States or in public view including:

•         Dozens of witnesses testifying under oath about: the physical blocking and kicking out of Republican poll challengers; thousands of the same ballots run multiple times through tabulators; mysterious late night dumps of thousands of ballots at tabulation centers; illegally backdating thousands of ballots; signature verification procedures ignored; more than 173,000 ballots in the Wayne County, MI center that cannot be tied to a registered voter;ⁱⁱ

•         Videos of: poll workers erupting in cheers as poll challengers are removed from vote counting centers; poll watchers being blocked from entering vote counting centers—despite even having a court order to enter; suitcases full of ballots being pulled out from underneath tables after poll watchers were told to leave.

•         Facts for which no independently verified reasonable explanation yet exists: On October 1, 2020, in Pennsylvania a laptop and several USB drives, used to program Pennsylvania’s Dominion voting machines, were mysteriously stolen from a warehouse in Philadelphia. The laptop and the USB drives were the only items taken, and potentially could be used to alter vote tallies; In Michigan, which also employed the same Dominion voting system, on November 4, 2020, Michigan election officials have admitted that a purported “glitch” caused 6,000 votes for President Trump to be wrongly switched to Democrat Candidate Biden. A flash drive containing tens of thousands of votes was left unattended in the Milwaukee tabulations center in the early morning hours of Nov. 4, 2020, without anyone aware it was not in a proper chain of custody.

8.         Nor was this Court immune from the blatant disregard for the rule of law. Pennsylvania itself played fast and loose with its promise to this Court. 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. A court of law would reasonably rely on such a representation. 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. Compare Republican Party of Pa. v. Boockvar, No. 20-542, 2020 U.S. LEXIS 5188, at *5-6 (Oct. 28, 2020) (“we have been informed by the Pennsylvania Attorney General that the Secretary of the Commonwealth issued guidance today directing county boards of elections to segregate [late-arriving] ballots”) (Alito, J., concurring) with Republican Party v. Boockvar, No. 20A84, 2020 U.S. LEXIS 5345, at *1 (Nov. 6, 2020) (“this Court was not informed that the guidance issued on October 28, which had an important bearing on the question whether to order special treatment of the ballots in question, had been modified”) (Alito, J., Circuit Justice).

9.         Expert analysis using a commonly accepted statistical test further raises serious questions as to the integrity of this election.

10.       The probability of former Vice President Biden winning the popular vote in the four Defendant States—Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—independently 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. 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). See Decl. of Charles J. Cicchetti, Ph.D. (“Cicchetti Decl.”) at ¶¶ 14-21, 30-31. See App. 4a-7a, 9a.

11.       The same less than one in a quadrillion statistical improbability of Mr. Biden winning the popular vote in the four Defendant States—Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin— independently exists when Mr. Biden’s performance in each of those Defendant States is compared to former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s performance in the 2016 general election and President Trump’s performance in the 2016 and 2020 general elections. Again, the statistical improbability of Mr. Biden winning the popular vote in these four States collectively is 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,0005. Id. 10-13, 17-21, 30-31.

12.       Put simply, there is substantial reason to doubt the voting results in the Defendant States. . . .

The above is a VERY SMALL portion of this lengthy lawsuit.