Thread by @ZoeTillman

Today marks the federal safe harbor deadline for states to certify election results. On what that means for Trump and his supporters' legal challenges: 
buzzfeednews.com/article/zoetil…

Meanwhile, we have a FLURRY of notable court activity to kick of the day. Yes, a thread:

Texas has moved to sue GA, MI, WI, and PA *in the US Supreme Court*. It's asking SCOTUS to let legislatures decide who won — an extraordinarily extreme ask rooted in baseless voter fraud conspiracies that numerous judges have repeatedly rejected texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/…

A dispute between states presents the rare situation where SCOTUS can have original jurisdiction to take up a case. The court doesn't have to hear any given case though — note that Paxton's filing is a motion to file the complaint. SCOTUS will rule on that first.

This case — filed more than a month after Election Day — challenges decisions state officials made about how to run the election during the pandemic *before* Election Day. And it promotes conspiracy theories that judges have found unsupported and not credible in the weeks since

It also argues that SCOTUS should invalidate millions of votes in part because Biden did better in these states than Hillary Clinton did and than Trump was supposed to. This argument is that it was suspicious simply that Biden got more votes

It also refers to Trump having an "early lead" the morning of Nov. 4, which misrepresents how the election works — millions of Americans were not still voting come Nov. 4. States were continuing to count ballots that had been cast/mailed, as is normal practice in elections

Texas is trying to shoehorn voter fraud conspiracy theories into the kind of COVID narrative SCOTUS has taken up before re: challenges to state/local closures. It's merging actual pandemic-related changes that states made to election processes ths year with wild fraud theories

Which is a long way of saying: This is the opposite of Bush v. Gore.

Bush v. Gore involved a specific number of ballots in one state.

TX's case is about a variety of election practices (and even different types of fraud conspiracy theories) across four states.

In other SCOTUS news: We have PA's response to Rep. Kelly et al.'s election challenge. This is the one the PA Supreme Court and lower courts rejected as being filed way too late, since it challenged a law that PA passed re: mail-in voting in Oct. 2019: scribd.com/document/48735…

Sidney Powell, meanwhile, is appealing yesterday's order dismissing her Georgia election challenge up to the 11th Circuit. Previously on that:

https://twitter.com/ZoeTillman/status/1335979859282178048

New: In Michigan, a Court of Claims judge has rejected a motion by GOP challengers to force Wayne County to do an election results audit. Judge finds there's no authority for that at the county level, and the SoS has already committed to doing an audit scribd.com/document/48736…