The US Supreme Court has rejected a lawsuit from Texas, which is backed by President Donald Trump, in a bid to overturn the November 3 presidential election results in four battleground states of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
“The state of Texas’s motion for leave to file a bill of complaint is denied for lack of standing under Article III of the Constitution,” the highest court wrote in its three-sentence order on Friday.
“Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections.
“All other pending motions are dismissed as moot,” Xinhua news agency quoted the order as further saying.
The ruling is widely seen as a death blow to Trump’s efforts to reverse his Democrat rival and President-elect Joe Biden’s projected Electoral College victory.
The Justices also turned away an appeal from Pennsylvania Republicans on Tuesday.
The Supreme Court “decisively and speedily rejected the latest of Donald Trump and his allies’ attacks on the democratic process”, Biden’s spokesman Mike Gwin said in a statement after Friday’s order.
“This is no surprise, dozens of judges, election officials from both parties, and Trump’s own Attorney General have dismissed his baseless attempts to deny that he lost the election,” Gwin added.
Trump’s attorney filed a motion on Wednesday with the Supreme Court after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton alleged that new voting processes in the four key swing states in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic skewed the presidential election results.
Over 12 states where Trump won the popular vote, as well as more than 120 Republican lawmakers, filed briefs in support of Texas’s action, while about two dozens states and territories that Biden won filed their own briefs in opposition to Texas’s complaint.
All 50 states and Washington, D.C. have reportedly certified their election results.
Electors are scheduled to meet in their state capital cities on December 14 to vote, which will be counted and finalised by the next Congress next month.
Biden is projected to win 306 electoral votes, compared with 232 for Trump.
To clinch the White House, a candidate needs at least 270 electoral votes of the 538 in total.
Trump has refused to concede, but dozens of lawsuits challenging the results have been dismissed at the state and federal levels across the country since the hotly-contested election.
