Ohio on Thursday joined other Republican-led states that are backing GOP President Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the outcome of the 2020 presidential election won by Democrat Joe Biden.
In an amicus brief, Republican Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost urged the U.S. Supreme Court to accept the lawsuit led by his GOP counterpart in Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton, which seeks to invalidate Electoral College votes in battleground states that Trump lost.
Ohio joins more than a dozen other GOP-led states that have signed on.
“Free and fair elections start with clear rules that don’t change right before the election,” Yost said in the brief. “It is not unreasonable to wonder — and many millions of Americans do — whether those hastily implemented changes exposed the election systems to vulnerabilities.”
The Trump challenge rehashes numerous disproven and unsupported allegations of illegal voting. It has been dismissed by legal experts as frivolous and criticized by some state officials.
Despite appearing to support the effort, Yost expressed skepticism in his filing about the central court remedy sought by Texas, which wants justices to order Legislatures to appoint a new set of electors in the targeted states.
“Federal courts, just like state courts, lack authority to change the legislatively chosen method for appointing presidential electors,” Yost said. “And so federal courts, just like state courts, lack authority to order legislatures to appoint electors without regard to the results of an already-completed election.”
Still, Yost said it is time for the Supreme Court to definitively rule on how the Electors Clause of the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted. The provision says legislators, not the executive and judicial branches, set rules for selecting electors.
Yost emphasized that he has no concerns about election results in Ohio, where voters favored Trump over Biden by more than 8 percentage points.
