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Ohio Joins Trump Effort To Overturn Election Results
By: Julie Carr Smyth | AP
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COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Ohio on Thursday joined other Republican-led states in backing GOP President Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the outcome of the presidential election.
In an amicus brief, Republican Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost urged the Supreme Court to accept the lawsuit led by GOP Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
The suit seeks to invalidate Electoral College votes in battleground states Trump lost. Ohio joined over a dozen other GOP-led states that have signed on.
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.