New claim: Constitution does not require hasty Electoral College vote, check fraud first
States rushing to brush aside President Trump’s legal challenges to begin picking electors by Monday are being advised to slow down in a new advisory that says the only date the Constitution mentions is Jan. 20, Inauguration Day.
Citing language in the famous Bush vs. Gore Supreme Court decision, the advisory said that while federal law sets two days in December for moving forward with the Electoral College voting, the Constitution doesn’t.
“The Supreme Court has ruled that the law does not actually require states to appoint Electors by that date in order for those Electoral Votes to be counted by Congress when determining the winner of the presidential election,” said a new white paper from the Amistad Project of the nonpartisan Thomas More Society, which is challenging the votes in several states.
What’s more, the document claims that in the five states it has filed challenges to the election results, enough violations took place to force the legislatures to take over for the electoral system.
“Through rigorous investigations supporting our litigation, we demonstrate that state and local officials brazenly violated election laws in several swing states in order to advance a partisan political agenda,” said Phill Kline, the director of the Amistad Project, in releasing the white paper.
“As a result, it is impossible for those states to determine their presidential Electors in line with the arbitrary deadline set forth via federal statute in 1948, and thus, the only deadline that matters is January 20, 2021,” he said.
The Trump campaign and others, including the Amistad Project, are scrambling to find evidence of voter and voting registration fraud, a process that can take years. In Nevada and Georgia, they believe they’ve produced enough to potentially change the results.
The project’s challenge to the Electoral College vote dates is just one angle of attack by Trump’s allies.
There are also a growing number of House conservatives who are eyeing challenging specific state Electoral College vote counts. That effort is being led by Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks, who believes that Joe Biden’s likely election can be reversed in the House.
Amistad, in challenging the key Electoral College dates of Dec. 8 and Dec. 14, said that they are outdated and obsolete.
Democrats have said that the president and his supporters are stalling the inevitable despite earlier calling for all votes to be counted.
Amistad compared the fight to a football game when one side tries to begin another play before a flag can be thrown. “Election officials in urban Democrat strongholds are behaving similar to a football team which gained an advantage from a questionable play and are now running up to the line of scrimmage to begin the next play before America can throw the red flag on the field to demand a closer look,” said the group.
Instead, it is urging states to take their time and that if irregularities are confirmed, they should send the vote to state legislatures, as suggested by the Constitution. Several states where voting has been challenged have majority-Republican state legislatures.
Said the Amistad Project: “Because the laws governing the conduct of elections were flagrantly violated in numerous states during the 2020 presidential election, there can be no determination of presidential Electors pursuant to state law. As such, the Constitution makes clear that the responsibility rests with state legislatures to appoint Electors. This should be done as expeditiously as possible, but the only deadline state lawmakers have an obligation to meet is the one deadline set forth in the Constitution — noon on January 20, 2021.”
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