The state of Colorado urged the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday to reject a longshot lawsuit, supported by President Donald Trump and two Colorado congressmen, that would overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
A brief filed by Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser and 22 other Democratic attorneys general accuses 18 Republican states, led by Texas, of trying to nullify a national election without cause, which would be unprecedented in American history.
“The people have chosen,” states the brief that Weiser signed. “But Texas, supported by 17 other states, asks this (Supreme) Court to overturn that choice. Those states urge this Court ‘to exercise its extraordinary power under the Constitution to control the conduct of one State at the suit of another,’ by nullifying millions of lawful votes and voiding the result of a free and fair election.”
Colorado is not a party in the Supreme Court case, known as Texas v. Pennsylvania, but Weiser used Thursday’s brief to stand with Pennsylvania and three other swing states — Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin — whose results are being challenged. Weiser and his partner attorneys general accused Texas of recycling “speculative ‘fraud’ claims rejected by dozens of federal courts.”
“As the experience of (our states) and the four defendant states demonstrates, voting by mail is a safe, secure and lawful method for conducting an election, particularly during a public health crisis,” states their brief to the high court.
The document was filed one day after a visiting professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, John C. Eastman, asked the Supreme Court to allow Trump to join the lawsuit in support of Texas and other states seeking to overturn the election. Eastman, who is CU Boulder’s visiting scholar in conservative thought and policy, claimed without evidence Wednesday that illegal conduct cost Trump the election.
“The fact that nearly half of the country believes the election was stolen should come as no surprise. President Trump prevailed on nearly every historical indicia of success in presidential elections,” wrote Eastman, before falsely claiming that no president before Trump had won Ohio and Florida but lost the election. Richard Nixon won both states in his narrow 1960 loss to John F. Kennedy.
Eastman’s argument is that the four swing states in question unconstitutionally modified their election practices to allow for mail-in voting and drop boxes during the pandemic — “fraud-inducing” changes in the professor’s words. But Colorado has used both mailed ballots and drop boxes for years without fraud.
Also on Thursday, two members of Congress from Colorado — Republican Reps. Ken Buck and Doug Lamborn — joined a brief in support of Texas at the Supreme Court. The congressmen stood with 104 other Republican House members in claiming “unconstitutional irregularities involved in the 2020 presidential election cast doubt upon its outcome and the integrity of the American system of elections.”
Like Eastman’s brief, that of the Republican House members claims Pennsylvania unconstitutionally changed its election laws, inviting fraud. But no court, in Pennsylvania or elsewhere across the country, has found significant election fraud this year.
