NEWS : US Supreme Court urged to throw out Texas,

 

US Supreme Court urged to throw out Texas, Donald Trump bid to overturn battleground state election results

Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have urged the US Supreme Court to reject a lawsuit filed by Texas and backed by President Donald Trump seeking to undo president-elect Joe Biden's election victory.

The battleground states say the case has no factual or legal grounds and offers "bogus" claims.

"What Texas is doing in this proceeding is to ask this court to reconsider a mass of baseless claims about problems with the election that have already been considered, and rejected, by this court and other courts," Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania's Democratic Attorney-General, wrote.

Texas filed the long-shot suit against the four states earlier this week directly with the Supreme Court.

It asked that the voting results in those states be thrown out because of their changes in voting procedures that allowed expanded mail-in voting during the coronavirus pandemic.

Mr Trump's campaign and his allies already have been spurned in numerous lawsuits in state and federal courts challenging the election results.

Legal experts have said the Texas lawsuit has little chance of succeeding and have questioned whether Texas has the legal standing to challenge election procedures in other states.

Mr Biden, a Democrat, defeated Mr Trump in the four states, which the Republican President had won in the 2016 election.

The Texas lawsuit, Mr Shapiro wrote, was adding to a "cacophony of bogus false claims" about the election.

Chris Carr, Georgia's Republican Attorney-General, noted like the others that Texas cannot show it has been harmed by the election results in other states.

"The novel and far-reaching claims that Texas asserts, and the breathtaking remedies it seeks, are impossible to ground in legal principles and unmanageable," Mr Carr wrote.