Ted Cruz attends a campaign event in Cumming,
Georgia, on 2 January.
Martin
Pengelly in New York
@MartinPengelly
Sat 2 Jan
2021 19.15 GMT
Ted Cruz of
Texas, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and nine other Republican US senators or
senators-elect said on Saturday they will reject presidential electors from
states where results are contested by Donald Trump’s campaign, “unless and
until [an] emergency 10-day audit is completed”.
Trump has
refused to concede defeat by Joe Biden, who won more than 7m more votes
nationally and took the electoral college by 306-232 – the same margin Trump
said was a landslide when he won it over Hillary Clinton in 2016.
The Trump
campaign has lost the vast majority of more than 50 lawsuits it has mounted in
battleground states, alleging mass electoral fraud, and before the US supreme
court.
On Friday,
a federal judge dismissed a suit lodged by a House Republican which attempted
to give the vice-president, Mike Pence, who will preside over the certification
of the electoral college result in Congress on Wednesday, 6 January, the power
to overturn that verdict.
Nonetheless,
the Republican senators and senators-elect who issued the statement on Saturday
follow Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri in committing to challenging the
electoral college results. Objections are also expected from a majority of
House Republicans.
That will
mean the objections must be debated and voted on but as Democrats control the
House and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and other senior
Republicans have voiced opposition, the objections seem doomed to fail.
Cruz and
Johnson were joined in issuing a statement on Saturday by Senators James
Lankford (Oklahoma), Steve Daines (Montana), John Kennedy (Louisiana), Marsha
Blackburn (Tennessee) and Mike Braun (Indiana).
Senators-elect
Cynthia Lummis (Wyoming), Roger Marshall (Kansas), Bill Hagerty (Tennessee) and
Tommy Tuberville (Alabama) also signed the statement.
“The
election of 2020,” the Republicans said, “like the election of 2016, was hard
fought and, in many swing states, narrowly decided. The 2020 election, however,
featured unprecedented allegations of voter fraud, violations and lax
enforcement of election law, and other voting irregularities.”
No hard
evidence for such claims has been presented. Federal officials, including
former attorney general William Barr and Christopher Krebs, a cyber security
chief subsequently fired by Trump, have said the election was secure.
Regardless,
the senators said Congress “should immediately appoint an electoral commission,
with full investigatory and fact-finding authority, to conduct an emergency
10-day audit of the election returns in the disputed states. Once completed,
individual states would evaluate the commission’s findings and could convene a
special legislative session to certify a change in their vote, if needed.”
Cruz, like
Hawley, is prominent among Republicans expected to run for president in 2024,
and thus eager to appeal to a party base still solidly loyal to Trump.
Perhaps
involuntarily pointing to widespread concern about the damage done by Trump’s
stance and the Republican party’s support for it, the senators and
senators-elect said their “allegations are not believed just by one individual
candidate.
“Instead,
they are widespread. Reuters/Ipsos polling, tragically, shows that 39% of
Americans believe ‘the election was rigged’. That belief is held by Republicans
(67%), Democrats (17%), and Independents (31%).
“Some
members of Congress disagree with that assessment, as do many members of the
media. But, whether or not our elected officials or journalists believe it,
that deep distrust of our democratic processes will not magically disappear. It
should concern us all. And it poses an ongoing threat to the legitimacy of any
subsequent administrations.”
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