While many are not willing to admit it, the Texas election lawsuit was the last real chance that President Donald Trump had to stall the official declaration of Joe Biden as the next President of the United States.

The lawsuit itself was doomed to fail for multiple Constitutional reasons, but perhaps the biggest flaw in it is that it was a group of outside states seeking to overturn election results in a handful of other states based on the fact that those states changed the rules in the middle of those elections going on. Critics of the lawsuit were right in saying that would be a dangerous precedent because that opens the door for ultra-progressive states to try and use the courts to force their values on conservative states.

But the idea behind the lawsuit was the correct one. States should not be allowed to change the rules in the middle of the game, and if there is one fight that needs to continue beyond this election, it is a fight to ensure that our elections systems are as trustworthy as possible and that the policies and procedures in place to run an election within a state are as fair to the voters as possible. //

This is not about overturning the election, mind you. Not at this point. There does not seem to be a legal avenue anymore to do that, and many of the legal avenues conservatives were led to believe existed were badly mishandled by the President’s lawyers and his allies. Instead, this needs to be about overturning the idea that states are allowed to change their election rules on a whim.

That is, I think, the real scandal here. That state officials are making changes to statutory election laws without their legislative branches being involved (in Georgia’s case, I believe the governor was given the power to make changes by the legislature, so the water is a little murkier there). There is, especially after this election, a considerable lack of trust in our electoral process. That has to change, and it needs to start with voters knowing their votes will count.