A Look at Trump’s Motion in Texas Case Against Wisconsin

President Donald Trump‘s campaign is attempting to join a lawsuit brought by the State of Texas and 17 other Republican-controlled states to overturn the election results in swing states critical to President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

Ken Paxton, attorney general for the State of Texas, filed a motion Monday asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case, which is targeting the election results in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia.

The court still has not granted Paxton’s request to hear the case.

In the legal complaint, Paxton alleges that the four states in question violated their own election laws during the administration of the election.

As Urban Milwaukee reported, Paxton’s suit goes after absentee ballots, repeating claims made by the Trump campaign that absentee ballot drop boxes were illegal, and that ballots where voters checked “indefinitely confined” should be thrown out.

The suit also points to the fact that Trump was winning before 3 a.m., and argues that Biden’s surge in votes once absentee ballots started being counted indicates an irregularity in the election. Except, major cities, like Milwaukee, were all reporting that a number of absentee ballots remained outstanding and that they wouldn’t be reported until the following morning at the earliest.

Like so many other suits filed by the Trump campaign and its allies, the Paxton suit seeks to have the court declare the election results in the four states invalid and to have the Republican-controlled state legislatures choose the electors for the presidential contest. 

Trump is represented by Attorney John C. Eastman in his motion to intervene in the Paxton suit. Attorney Eastman made a name for himself promoting a birther conspiracy theory against Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.

In the complaint in Trump’s motion to intervene, Eastman makes reference to a Rasmussen poll on the percentage of Americans that believe there was election fraud. He points to polarization, saying the country has not been so divided since the election of 1860 — which directly preceded the U.S. Civil War. 

He incorrectly claims that no candidate for president has ever lost the election after winning Florida and Ohio. In 1960, Richard Nixon won both Florida and Ohio and still lost to John F. Kennedy. He pointed to victories in “bellwether counties” and down ballot Republican victories around the country. Then he points to the fact Trump received more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016, ignoring the fact this was a record-breaking election for voter turnout.

After all of this, Eastman muses that “These things just don’t normally happen, and a large percentage of the American people know that something is deeply amiss.”

Eastman goes on to repeat many of the allegations concerning absentee ballots and ballot drop boxes found in the Paxton suit. And he alleges there was a “nationwide campaign” of lawsuits leading up to the election that sought to weaken ballot security and integrity.

His argument posits that because state legislatures did not legislate absentee ballot guidelines, they are therefore illegal.

But nowhere in the complaint does Eastman provide proof that election laws were violated. Eastman even admits as much when he writes: “It is not necessary for the Plaintiff in Intervention to prove that fraud occurred.” Rather, the plaintiff, in this case Trump, only needs to demonstrate that the elections “materially deviated from the ‘manner’ of choosing electors established by their respective state Legislatures.”

Read the motion to intervene here.