U.S. Senator Ted Cruz on Saturday said he will spearhead a drive by nearly a dozen Republican senators to challenge President-elect Joe Biden’s victory when Electoral College results are tallied in Congress on Jan. 6 – a largely symbolic move that has virtually no chance of preventing Biden from taking office, Reuters writes.
Cruz’s effort is in defiance of Senate Republican leaders, who have argued that the Senate’s role in certifying the election is largely ceremonial and had been looking to avoid an extended debate on the floor about the outcome.
In a statement, Cruz, the U.S. senator from Texas, and the other 10 senators said they intend to vote to reject electors from states that have been at the center of President Donald Trump’s unproven assertions of election fraud. They said Congress should immediately appoint a commission to conduct an emergency 10-day audit of election results in those 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,” they said.
It was not immediately clear which states would be subject to the proposed audit, Cruz’s office said.
Democrats and some moderate Republicans blasted the move by the senators as undemocratic. A spokesman for the Biden campaign, Michael Gwin, dismissed the move as theater that is not supported by any evidence.
“This stunt won’t change the fact that President-elect Biden will be sworn in on Jan. 20, and these baseless claims have already been examined and dismissed by Trump’s own attorney general, dozens of courts, and election officials from both parties,” he said.
The push for an audit is a political stunt that will not affect the outcome of the election, said Derek Muller, a law professor at the University of Iowa.
Muller said that, while the 1887 law governing how lawmakers validate the election is murky, most scholars believe that Congress lacks the legal authority to require the audit.
Even if lawmakers had that power, a majority of both chambers would need to support the audit, and there is virtually no chance of the proposal having that level of support, he said.
Biden beat Trump by a 306-232 margin in the Electoral College.
Under the Electoral College system, “electoral votes” are allotted to states and the District of Columbia based on their congressional representation.
Trump has been encouraging Republicans to prevent Biden from taking office, although there is no viable mechanism for them to do so.
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