Big Sky Times

Gov. Steve Bullock handed in a petition to the Supreme Court just prior to its rejection of Texas’ voter fraud lawsuit.

The lawsuit which had been backed by more than 17 other states was filed against Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia and Pennsylvania. 

In a-one page filing Friday evening the Supreme Court said the case had a “lack of standing” in the constitution. 

“Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections,” the court said in its dismissal. 

The argument by the plaintiff, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, is the four states in question illegally extended hours for absentee voting deadlines, among other irregularities.

In his petition, the Montana governor states that “as this Court has repeatedly emphasized, challenges to state election laws should occur in an orderly fashion, on a non-emergency basis, well in advance of elections, according to ordinary rules of civil procedure. They should not be raised in the Supreme Court, on an emergency basis, in an effort to overturn the result of an election that has already occurred.”

Gov. Bullock continued to urge the Court to decline Texas complaint on the basis that its “untimely suit would not merely disenfranchise voters in the four Defendant states. Texas’s arguments could just as well be made with respect to any State that took precautionary measures against the COVID-19 pandemic. As such, Texas’s suit threatens to destabilize the result of the general election in all such States. If any action by the courts could shake confidence in republican government to its core, it would be the overturning of state election outcomes based on the retroactive nullification of safety precautions validly adopted in the face of a once-in-a-century global pandemic.”

The outcome of the Supreme Court lawsuit is bound to affect the state of Montana which also extended absentee voting deadlines. On Sept. 2, Bullock was sued, in a failed court case, by the Trump campaign who asserted that the Governor’s Election Directive for people to use mail ballots as a way of curbing the spread of COVID-19, would lead to voter fraud. The case was set aside for lack of evidence.