Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt signed an amicus brief along with nine other state attorneys general who are supporting the Republican Party of Pennsylvania on an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The brief argues that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision enhanced the risks of vote-by-mail fraud.
Other Republican Attorneys General who support the amicus brief include those in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Texas.
“Overwhelming public evidence demonstrates that voting by mail presents unique opportunities for fraud and abuse, opportunities which unscrupulous actors have often exploited,” wrote Schmitt in the Nov. 9 friend of the court brief. “The decision below exacerbated these risks.”
Republican Party of Pennsylvania v. Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar is pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. CBS News reports that counties were ordered by Justice Samuel Alito on Nov. 6 to segregate late-arriving ballots and count them separately after Republicans filed an emergency request.
On Nov. 20, Attorney Barry Berke replaced Boockvar's law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, as her legal counsel, according to Epoch Times, which also reported that Federal Election Commission Chairman Trey Trainor said affidavits from the Trump campaign show fraud occurred in the presidential elections.
A former associate justice of the Missouri Supreme Court who was appointed by Democratic Gov. Mel McCarnahan, Michael A. Wolff contends that the amicus brief and even the lawsuit are a waste of time.
"If you want to spend a lot of money solving a nonexistent problem, have at it but just don't spend my money," Wolff told the St. Louis Record.
Schmitt is trying to reverse a decision by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that allows mail-in ballots that were received three days after Nov. 3 to be counted.
The deadline for presidential electors from every state to cast their votes is on Dec. 14.
The three arguments central to the pleading that Wolff rebuts include:
The decision provided a window of time after Election Day, when the preliminary results were announced, in which unscrupulous actors could attempt to influence a close Presidential election
“They're ignoring the fact that there are states where that leeway period is in effect and it hasn't made a bit of difference in terms of whether there was fraud or not,” Wolff, a Saint Louis University School of Law Professor Emeritus, said. “People are trying to align themselves with what President Trump is saying because he is very influential with a large block of voters in Missouri. If somebody wants to be Governor or Senator and move up from being Attorney General, it would behoove him to get on their side.”
The second argument is that the decision enhanced the opportunities for fraud by requiring boards of elections to count late-received ballots even if there is no evidence that those ballots were cast before Election Day because they have no legible postmark.
“They should prove it but they can't and even if they did prove that some of them were not postmarked, it doesn’t make any difference,” Wolff said in an interview. “The other fact is that we rely upon a cadre of literally hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens who come and work for little or no pay to run our elections.”
The third claim is that allowing non-postmarked ballots to be counted made the state vulnerable to deception.
“When ballots arrive by mail, in most states, they are examined by at least two people, a Democrat and a Republican,” Wolff said. “They look at it and if they see that there's no postmark, it’s set aside and not counted."