The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to take up a legal plea from Dan Cox, an ex-state legislator in Maryland who was also the unsuccessful — but Trump-endorsed — Republican candidate for governor in that state in last year’s elections. Cox’s huge loss to Democratic candidate Wes Moore meant the I Maryland governorship flipped partisan control.
The legal dispute before the Supreme Court centered on the tabulation of absentee ballots in Maryland, where state law, as it stood before last year’s election, would’ve ordinarily demanded that election authorities wait until after Election Day to even open mail-in ballots. With that method of voting often popular, that forced delay could’ve led to a significant hurdle in actually finalizing election results, and for a multitude of reasons, such a gap between voting and determining the winner isn’t ideal. Maryland election authorities successfully obtained special permission from the state courts to start processing mail-in votes at a much earlier point, which mirrored an allowance provided by the then-governor (Republican Larry Hogan) for the 2020 elections. Cox was mad, intervening in the case and arguing that the court supposedly overstepped its Constitutional bounds.
Cox’s argument rested on the idea that the U.S. Constitution provides for extremely expansive restrictions on how authorities in state government other than state legislators can check the power of those legislative officials to set the rules of conducting at least federal elections. A similarly styled opposition has emerged in disputes over drawing the lines for Congressional districts.
Here, the Supreme Court didn’t provide a reason for its rejection of even taking up Cox’s dispute, although one could obviously imagine the controversy was largely moot, since the election is long over. The failed candidate for governor wanted the Justices to step in after the dispute in Maryland state courts went all the way up to that state’s highest judicial authority, with the challenge still working out in officials’ favor. Some Republicans have tried to use complaints about the procedural handling of elections as seemingly something essentially synonymous with Trump’s bonkers allegations of systematic fraud, which is obviously an inaccurate connection to draw.
Cox isn’t the only failed Republican candidate for governor still losing in court. Kari Lake, the GOP contender for governor in Arizona who lost last year, is still disputing her defeat in court, although an appeals court in her state recently rejected one of her latest challenges. Disturbingly, despite advocating for redoing the election, Lake was explicitly arguing she didn’t even need to show in such specific terms how the fraud she claimed was present affected the results from the election that already happened. Her idea was evidently instead that the general appearance of supposed fraud was enough to throw out the will of the people of Arizona.
