Two Reasons Texas Election Case Is Faulty

Texas Attorney General, Ken Paxton, has told the Supreme Court that he has never done so before: boycott millions of voters in four states and reverse the presidential election results.

Election law experts said that the matter is highly problematic from a legal point of view and is fraught with procedural and substantive deficiencies.

And for its argument to be successful – an outcome that is not very likely, according to legal scholars – most of the nine justices would have to ignore a debatable claim that President-Elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. was less likely to win. One of a quadrillion. “

Mr. Paxton is a reconciled figure to face varying charges while under indictment in a securities fraud case and by several former employees abusing his office to assist a political donor.

Here are some reasons why this case is probably not a “big one” like President Trump Has called.

Legal experts said the legal logic of the suit is deeply flawed.

No claim to pursue texas court case, Which will extend Monday’s deadline for certification of presidential elections in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It relies on a novel theory that Texas can determine how other states run their elections because voting irregularities elsewhere hurt Texas’ rights.

The Paxton case fails to establish why Texas has the right to interfere with the process through which other states cast their votes at the Electoral College, Edward B., a law professor at Ohio State University. Foley and the director of its election law program said. The authority to manage elections rests on the states individually, not in any kind of collective sense as the Paxton suit implies.

“They all do what they do,” Mr. Foley said. “What Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania and these other states have done is going to be a lot like Massachusetts to try to complain about how Texas elects its senators.”

The state’s attorney general is generally wary of his rights and the intervention of the Supreme Court, which Mr. Foley said is unusual. “It’s just the opposite,” he said. “This will be an unprecedented intrusion into state sovereignty.”

Four states named in suit Condemned it on Thursday And urged the court to dismiss it. Michigan’s Attorney General, Dana Nessel, accused Mr. Paxton and other Trump aides of running “a disinfection campaign attacking the integrity of the election system.”

The lawsuit that seeks remedy – the disintegration of millions of voters – would be without precedent in the nation’s history.

Even if the suit was justified, it was almost certainly filed too late, as Texas procedures were in force prior to the election.

A Supreme Court Brief Opposing Texas requests by prominent Republicans, former Missouri senator John Danforth and former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman said, Texas filings “create a mockery of federalism and segregation of powers.”

“It would violate the most fundamental constitutional principles for this court,” Brief said, “to serve as a trial court for presidential election disputes.”

Mr. Trump and his supporters often called Bush v. Gore points to the Supreme Court case that decided the 2000 election as an optimistic historical precedent in his favor. But unlike Bush v. Gore, there is not a clear constitutional question on this issue.

“It looks like a natural political suit,” Mr. Foley said.

The suite uses statistical arguments that experts call ‘comic’.

Mr. Paxton’s filing has repeatedly cited an analysis by a California economist that statisticians have said it is nonsense. Mr Biden’s chances of winning four battleground states, the analysis says, were “less than one in a quadrillion”.

The Economist, Charles J. Cicheti, who Donated For Mr. Trump’s campaign in 2016, MinCules arrived at the prospect by allowing the results of the 2016 election to be used as a backstop. His flawed argument was: If Mr. Biden had received The number of votes Hillary Clinton voted in 2016, she wrote, a victory would have been impossible for all.

But Mr. Biden could not, of course, receive the same vote as Mrs. Clinton; He gained more than 15 million. Nor will a candidate be expected to get the same votes as the previous candidate.

This one-in-a-quarter figure has been echoing all over social media and has been promoted by White House Press Secretary. But an array of experts have said that the figure and Mr. Cicchetti’s analysis are easily refutable.

Stephen Ansolbehere, a professor of government at Harvard University who runs his own electoral data collection, called the analysis a “comic”.

The analysis omitted a number of clear, relevant facts, he said: “The context of elections is different, that a Kovid epidemic is going on, people arrive at various conclusions about the administration, that Biden and Clinton are different candidates. “

By the same logic and formula, if Mr. Trump had received the same number of votes in 2020 as he did in 2016, there is also a one in quadrillion probability that Mr. Trump would surpass his totals in 2016 . C. Preston, Professor of Mathematics at Brooklyn College. “But that doesn’t prove Trump a cheat, it just shows that the numbers are different,” he said. “It’s like finding a low probability that equals 2.”

Mr. Cicchetti also wrote that in this process the votes counted first and the votes counted later were in favor of different candidates, and that “one of the many more quadratic occasions” was that the two time periods counted The voters used to come from the same group of voters.

But that’s all right What was expected: Democrats tended to prefer voting by mail, and those ballots were later counted in four battlegrounds, while Republicans preferred to vote in person on Election Day, and those ballots were counted earlier. Was done.

“The order and pace of counting was opposite to previous elections,” said Amal Ahmed, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Massachusetts.

What Mr. Cicheti wrote was not particularly revelatory, the experts agreed.

“The model is silly,” said Philip Stark, a professor of statistics at the University of California at Berkeley. “It’s not science or statistics. It is also not a good cartoon of election. “

The Attorney General of Texas has been caught in the scandal.

Although the legal logic of Mr. Paxton’s case may be novel, it does not impulse. It was the latest example of Trump’s loyalty using the power of public office to support the president, whose support base is deeply tied to his and highly contends that the election was unfair, according to Election.

Mr Paxton, 57, has been under a cloud of scandal since October, when lawyers for seven of his senior employees accused his boss of bribery, abuse of his office and other wrongdoing. His charges, which Mr. Paxton has denied, include a wealthy developer and political donor, Nat Paul, whose homes and offices were raided by federal agents in August.

The associates accused Mr. Paxton of “potential criminal offenses”, including assisting in the defense of Mr. Paul and interfering with the developer’s efforts to make favorable decisions in legal battles between his properties and nonprofits.

First elected in 2014, Mr. Paxton served much of his term under an unresolved securities fraud stemming from events that took place before he took office. The indictment accused Mr. Paxton of selling the technology shares to investors in 2011, revealing that he received 100,000 shares of the stock as compensation, and failed to register with securities regulators.

Mr. Paxton nevertheless maintains a high national profile – and the affection of conservatives – with his tireless efforts to destroy the policies of the Obama era and cater to the causes of the Trump administration.