Seventeen US states on Wednesday filed a brief at the US Supreme Court supporting a bid by Texas to overturn the presidential election results.Those states are: Missouri, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah and West Virginia.

All of the states were represented by Republican officials in the filing. All but three of the states have Republican governors.

The suit from the Texas Attorney-General, Republican Ken Paxton, demands that the 62 total electoral college votes in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin be invalidated.

That’s enough, if set aside, to swing the election to Donald Trump.

Trump called the Texas case “the big one” and vowed to intervene in it.

“We will be INTERVENING in the Texas (plus many other states) case,” Trump wrote on Twitter.

“This is the big one. Our Country needs a victory!”

According to election law experts, the Texas lawsuit is “absurd” and “laughable”.

Rebecca Green, a professor at William and Mary Law School in Virginia, said Texas did not have legal standing to challenge how other states handled the election.

“It is so outlandish. It is totally contrary to how our Constitution mandates that elections be run,” Green said.

“The idea that a state could complain about another state’s processes is just absurd.”

“Both procedurally and substantively, it’s a mess,” Justin Levitt, an election law professor at Loyola Law School in California, said.

“There’s zero chance the court agrees to take the case.”

Paxton’s suit repeats a litany of false, disproven and unsupported allegations about mail-in ballots and voting in the four battlegrounds.

-AAP