Breitbart News publishes an op-ed by former Kansas Secretary of State – Kris W. Kobach – analyzing the Texas Attorney General’s lawsuit against Pennsylvania and four other major battleground states for unconstitutionality.
Just before midnight on Monday (December 7), the Texas Attorney General filed a lawsuit on behalf of the State of Texas in the Federal Supreme Court, claiming that Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin were unconstitutional in the presidential election.
More important than any previous election-related lawsuit, the Texas lawsuit presents a purely legal question and does not require proof of a specific case of fraud; it is sufficient to prove that the four states violated the Constitution.
Texas argues that the four states violated the U.S. Constitution in two separate ways. One was changing voting rules without the state legislature, and the second was failing to ensure that every county in the state was treated equally on the ballot.
Under U.S. law, if a state sues another state, it has to go to the federal high court to resolve the matter, and the Texas Attorney General has to represent Texas in suing the other four states, and the federal high court has to handle it.
Texas sued the other four states because Texas believed it was following the constitutional election process, and these four states changed the way the election was conducted, which is not only a constitutional issue, but also unfair to Texas.
Here is the specific constitutional interpretation.
The Electors Clause of the Constitution requires the states to “appoint” presidential electors “in such manner as their legislatures may direct. In the early days of the Union, most state legislatures appointed presidential electors directly, without popular vote; this changed in the first decades of the 19th century, but the constitutional principle remained the same: state legislatures make the rules, and state legislatures alone make the rules, whether they appoint state electors by vote of the state legislature or by popular vote.
Mr. Kris W. Kobach argued that all four states violated the Electors Clause of Article II of the Constitution by having state executive or judicial officers change the election rules without the approval of the state legislature. In Pennsylvania, the Supreme Court extended the deadline for receipt of mail-in ballots by three days, which became a state court rulemaking for general elections, in violation of the Voter Clause of the Constitution. In Georgia, the Secretary of State and the Democratic Party of Georgia entered into a compromise settlement and release agreement (i.e., a consent decree) in response to a lawsuit and modified the signature verification requirements under Georgia law, a rule change that also violates the Voter Clause.
The second unconstitutional issue is that in each of the four states there are counties that have changed the way they receive, evaluate, or process ballots. In Bush v. Gore, two decades ago, two Florida counties were ruled by the Supreme Court to have violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because they handled their ballots differently – voters have a constitutional right to have their ballots counted in each county. It needs to be treated the same way. In Wayne County, Michigan, election officials ignored state law by refusing to allow supervisors to participate in the vote count. Other counties in Michigan have complied with state law. This situation would be a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. In Wisconsin, the administrator of the Milwaukee Board of Elections ignored the requirements of state law and instructed election officials to write the witness’s address on the envelope containing the mailed ballot, which turned out to be a valid ballot, while the ballot without the witness’s address was invalid in other counties in Wisconsin, leading to the problem that counties in Wisconsin treat ballots differently.
Chris Kobach is an expert on immigration law and election fraud. He served as Kansas Secretary of State from 2011-2019. He was a professor of constitutional and immigration law at the University of Missouri-KC from 1996 to 2011.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/12/07/kobach-texas-case-challenges-election-directly-at-supreme-court/
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