The U.S. Supreme Court has considered its second 2020 presidential-election challenge since Election Day.

Texas filed the second challenge, asserting claims against Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Although the high court declined to accept the challenge, because Texas lacks standing to bring such a challenge against another state, other challenges remain.

Other challengers don’t have Texas’s problem with standing.

Texas’s complaint in effect blazes a trail of arguments — not the only trail, mind you — that others can raise in the high court.

Paragraph 7 succinctly explains some of the extensive evidence of election fraud in the four defendant states:

¯ “Dozens of witnesses testifying under oath about: the physical blocking and kicking out of Republican poll challengers; thousands of the same ballots run multiple times through tabulators; mysterious late night dumps of thousands of ballots at tabulation centers; illegally backdating thousands of ballots; signature verification procedures ignored; more than 173,000 ballots in the Wayne County, (Mich.,) center that cannot be tied to a registered voter(.)

¯”Videos of: poll workers erupting in cheers as poll challengers are removed from vote counting centers; poll watchers being blocked from entering vote counting centers — despite even having a court order to enter; suitcases full of ballots being pulled out from underneath tables after poll watchers were told to leave.

¯”Facts for which no independently verified reasonable explanation yet exists: On October 1, 2020, in Pennsylvania a laptop and several USB drives, used to program Pennsylvania’s Dominion voting machines, were mysteriously stolen from a warehouse in Philadelphia. The laptop and the USB drives were the only items taken, and potentially could be used to alter vote tallies(.) In Michigan, which also employed the same Dominion voting system, on November 4, 2020, Michigan election officials have admitted that a purported ‘glitch’ caused 6,000 votes for President Trump to be wrongly switched to Democrat Candidate (Joe) Biden. A flash drive containing tens of thousands of votes was left unattended in the Milwaukee tabulations center in the early morning hours of Nov. 4, 2020, without anyone aware it was not in a proper chain of custody.”

However, the Texas complaint’s primary focus is the unconstitutionality of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin election laws and procedures.

Please remember from the columns of one and two weeks ago that Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution empowers state legislators — and only state legislators — to appoint presidential electors.

Texas’s complaint notes that persons other than state legislators changed law and procedures by which Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin appoint electors.

Such laws and procedures thereby violate Article II, Section 1, Clause 2.

This isn’t hard to understand.

Pages 1 to 2 of Texas’s complaint summarizes how some such laws and procedures came to be: “Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a justification, government officials in the defendant states of Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania … usurped their legislatures’ authority and unconstitutionally revised their state’s election statutes. They accomplished these statutory revisions through executive fiat or friendly lawsuits, thereby weakening ballot integrity. Finally, these same government officials flooded the Defendant States with millions of ballots to be sent through the mails, or placed in drop boxes, with little or no chain of custody and, at the same time, weakened the strongest security measures protecting the integrity of the vote — signature verification and witness requirements.”

Readers of last week’s column will recall that other unconstitutional statutory revisions were enacted by other means.

Yet regardless of the means of enactment, does any of this affect the election’s result? Paragraph 15 explains why it does: “The number of absentee and mail-in ballots that have been handled unconstitutionally in Defendant States greatly exceeds the difference between the vote totals of the two candidates for President of the United States in each Defendant State.”

Now let’s see what happens in challenges following Texas’s in the U.S. Supreme Court, the only court whose decisions may well ultimately control.

As Texas’s complaint says in its opening paragraph: “Either the Constitution matters and must be followed, even when some officials consider it inconvenient or out of date, or it is simply a piece of parchment on display at the National Archives.”

The high court already understands this, including with respect to unconstitutional executive orders that lower courts have mistakenly upheld.

Reversing the upholding of such an order in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, N.Y. v. Cuomo on Nov. 25, 2020, the high court held that “even in a pandemic, the Constitution cannot be put away and forgotten.”

Last week’s column by Dr. Randy Elf, who has filed briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court, addresses a different challenge to Pennsylvania law.

COPYRIGHT 2020 BY RANDY ELF