Texas's latest election lawsuit filing is chock-full of 'factual gibberish': Top legal reporter

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Friday filed a response to four Biden-backing swing states in its Supreme Court lawsuit aimed at overturning the 2020 presidential election -- and Reuters legal reporter Brad Heath has found it none too impressive.

Writing on Twitter, Heath broke down Texas's latest filing and explained that it contained multiple factual howlers, most notably in its defense of an analyst who implausibly claimed that Biden had less than a one-in-quadrillion chance of winning Pennsylvania.

The error in Texas's analyst, as the state of Pennsylvania explained, was that he believed that there was no plausible way for Biden to have caught up with the lead Trump had in Pennsylvania on election night unless he did so fraudulently because the outstanding ballots that were counted in the days after went overwhelmingly for President-elect Joe Biden.

In reality, Democrats this election cycle were much more likely to vote by mail and Pennsylvania's Republican-led legislature refused to allow the counting of mail-in ballots until the day of the election, which created what elections analysts call a "red mirage" appearing to show Trump ahead.

Texas, however, argued that this was completely immaterial to its analyst's findings.

"Dr. Cicchetti did take into account the possibility that votes were not randomly drawn in the later time period but, as stated in his original Declaration, is not aware of any data that would support such an assertion," Texas wrote in its lawsuit.

Heath reacted with astonishment to this reasoning, which he summarized as saying because the swing states don't "understand some of the factual gibberish in its allegations, the allegation must be correct!"