Texas isn't expecting the four states it's suing over the November election to "put the genie back in the bottle," but it hopes the Supreme Court will agree that their legislatures should pick electors who will, in turn, choose the next president, state Attorney General Ken Paxton said Thursday.
"In my state, we were able to protect the system as legislature set it up," Paxton told Fox Business' Maria Bartiromo on "Mornings With Maria." "We didn't let the genie out of the bottle. We can verify results did it the way legislature intended."
But in the states Texas has sued — Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Georgia — that hasn't happened, said Paxton.
"There is no way to go back and look at 2.5 million ballots in Pennsylvania to know whether there was fraud, so that remedy is virtually impossible, if not impossible," said Paxton. "We are asking the court put [the election] back in the hands of the state legislature to pick their own electors, as it's been done for years by certain state legislatures."
Paxton will be at the White House for a lunch with President Donald Trump, along with a dozen other GOP state attorneys general, reports The Houston Chronicle. Ten of them have backed the Texas election challenge. The White House says the meeting was scheduled weeks ago and that it is closed to the press.
Paxton told Bartiromo Thursday morning that the genesis for his lawsuits came because it "seemed wrong to us" that voters in Texas were "disenfranchised" in the national election because the other states "didn't follow state law."
"A lot of those states eliminated signature verification, which is the only check you have on the credibility of those ballots," said Paxton.
The attorneys general of 17 states where Trump won filed an amicus brief on Wednesday to join in Texas' efforts, including Missouri, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia. Arizona GOP Attorney General Mark Brnovich has filed a separate brief to support the case.
Paxton said it's a good question whether or not the Supreme Court will take up the case after so many other states have joined in. But if it won't hear the case, there is no place else the states can go for recourse.
The case is important not only because of Trump and Joe Biden, said Paxton, but because of future elections in the United States.
"I want to make sure the right person is elected based on what voters did in the country," he said. "Otherwise, we can't trust elections going forward. That is a real problem for democracy."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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