Alabama and Louisiana AGs Want to Join Texas Battleground Election Lawsuit

By Daniel Villarreal

NW - Writer

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The attorneys general of Alabama and Louisiana have expressed interest in possibly joining a lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to have the Supreme Court invalidate election results in four key battleground states—Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The suit seeks to have each state's lawmakers decide their electors, rather than having the electors reflect the will of their voting citizens.

"The unconstitutional actions and fraudulent votes in other states not only affect the citizens of those states, they affect the citizens of all states—of the entire United States," Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said in a statement published Tuesday on Twitter. He pledged to join Paxton's case if the Supreme Court takes it up.

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In a separate statement, Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry wrote, "Some states appear to have conducted their elections with a disregard to the U.S. Constitution. Furthermore, many Louisianans have become more frustrated as some in media and the political class try to sidestep legitimate issues for the sake of expediency."

Landry claims that because the Constitution leaves the power of deciding the time, place and manner of holding elections to state legislatures, the four aforementioned battleground states made changes to their elections to prevent further spread of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic without passing these changes through the legislature. Thus, Paxton's suit claims, the changes were unconstitutional and the states' election results should be invalidated.

"Louisiana citizens are damaged if elections in other states were conducted outside the confines of the Constitution while we obeyed the rules," Landry wrote.

Ken Paxton, Alabama Lousiana Wisconsin election lawsuit

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The legislatures of the four battleground states named in Paxton's lawsuits are all Republican-led. Thus, if the legislatures were allowed to choose who to cast their electoral ballots for, it's conceivable that they might choose to cast their electoral ballots for Trump, the Republican incumbent.

Georgia has 16 electoral votes, Michigan has 16, Pennsylvania has 20 and Wisconsin has 10. The combined total of 62, if taken from President-elect Joe Biden's current total of 306 and applied to Trump's current total of 232, would give Trump 294 electoral votes and effectively hand him the presidency despite losing the popular vote by over 7 million votes.

However, this scenario would require the Supreme Court to take up Paxton's case, something that their recent rulings have suggested they're not eager to do. On Tuesday, the court rejected an effort by Pennsylvania Republicans to invalidate Pennsylvania's popular votes and let the state legislature choose its electors.

The Attorney Generals of the four battleground states mentioned in Paxton's lawsuit condemned his legal filing as anti-democratic and without merit.

Absent any action by the Supreme Court, the Electoral College's electors are set to meet on December 14 to cast their final votes. After that, the final vote count will be approved by the U.S. Congress on January 6, the last formal step to finalize the election's results before Inauguration Day on January 20.

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