GOP congresswoman questions 'constitutionality' of elections Trump lost

A Republican U.S. representative gave a demonstrably false reason on Tuesday for her decision to participate in a last-ditch scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York told Fox News that she will join more than a hundred House Republicans on Wednesday in objecting to certification of the results of voting in the Electoral College in swing states won by President-elect Joe Biden.

Without offering any evidence of election fraud or theft, she said that she would attempt to block the counting of those electoral votes because many people think there might have been fraud and theft.

“I believe that this debate and discussion is owed to the American people. You have tens of millions of Americans who really have questions about the ballot integrity and election security,” Stefanik said.

She then suggested that “unelected” state officials had broken the law in making changes to voting procedures in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

“I also have serious questions about the constitutionality of unilateral changes that were made in multiple states by unelected bureaucrats — secretaries of state — who circumvented state legislatures,” she charged. “In many states they did not follow their own states’ election law.”

However, in all but one of the six states whose electoral votes House Republicans reportedly plan to challenge, the secretary of state is an elected position.

The secretary of the commonwealth in Pennsylvania, which Donald Trump won in 2016 but lost in 2020, is appointed by the governor. In Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada, the secretary of state is elected.

Both Georgia and Nevada have elected Republicans serving in those positions — and much to Trump’s dismay, Nevada enacted legislation to implement universal voting by mail last August.

And while Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar was appointed to her post, the major changes to Pennsylvania’s election process in 2020 were a result of the state’s Supreme Court’s interpretation of the state constitution, not unilateral actions on Boockvar’s part.

Some state officials did implement measures to make it easier to vote by mail during the COVID-19 pandemic, but were within their executive authority in doing so. Numerous legal challenges to such measures were rejected by state and federal courts.

Stefanik is part of a large GOP contingent — more than 100 representatives and at least 12 senators — attempting to overturn Biden’s win. But she joined all but two House Republicans in voting to seat all of the members of Congress elected from those same six states in the very same election they are questioning — under the very same rules.

With majorities in the House and Senate opposed to the attempt to overturn the will of the voters, the challenges during Wednesday’s joint session of Congress are almost certain to fail.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.