Giuliani tells Pennsylvania lawmakers they can overturn popular vote to name pro-Trump voters



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Speaking to an at times noisy but mostly disgruntled panel of Republicans in Pennsylvania, President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and his campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis on Wednesday hinted that the state lawmaker could decide for himself whether to give the 20 Pennsylvania electoral college votes to Trump, despite the state certifying Joe Biden won the state’s Nov. 3 election.

“It is the state legislature that controls this process,” Giuliani told a panel of Republican lawmakers. “It’s your power. It is your responsibility. And I think you know, and you’ve got to convince the rest of your members, Republicans and Democrats, [that] they owe it to the people of their state, and they owe it to the people of the United States.

The public meeting held Wednesday afternoon by the Senate Majority Policy Committee, and chaired by Republican Senator Doug Mastriano, called into question the validity of the Pennsylvania election results and cast doubt on the counting process. President Trump called the meeting and repeated false claims that he won the election “by many” and that it was stolen from him.

President-elect Joe Biden defeated Trump in Pennsylvania by around 81,000 votes and by around 6 million in the national popular vote.

Rudy Giuliani
Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani in Gettysburg, Pa., Wednesday. (Julio Cortez / AP)

Giuliani spent much of the audience denouncing the mail-in ballots and alleging that Republican poll observers were not required to observe the counting process, a claim that so far has not ‘was not upheld in court.

A number of witnesses reported suspicious activity during the counting process, such as hundreds of thousands of ballots left unopened in ballot boxes and then mysteriously gone. Giuliani and Ellis argued that this was evidence of a coordinated fraud that also involved officials from half a dozen other states, and said that was reason enough to revoke the certification of Tuesday of Biden’s victory in the state.

The session was billed as a hearing, but it took place at the Wyndham Hotel in Gettysburg, Pa., Not the state capital of Harrisburg, and witnesses – including self-appointed data experts and amateur statisticians, Republican observers during the count. and a few voters who reported suspicious activity when voting – did not take an oath.

When asked about a possible cure, Ellis cited the U.S. Constitution, which says that each state appoints a number of voters based on the number of Senators and Representatives the state has in Congress, and empowers state legislatures to determine the way of choosing them.

Under Pennsylvania law, the governor appoints voters, based on the state’s popular vote results. Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, said On Tuesday, the state’s presidential voters were chosen and certified in accordance with the state’s popular vote.

“This is exactly how the process has to go – people vote, those votes are counted and the voters chosen reflect the will of the people,” he said on Twitter.

Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis
Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis. (via Reuters TV)

What Ellis and Giuliani appeared to be insisting on Wednesday, among other potential ‘cures’, was for the Legislature to reinstate the process by sending its own voters list to the Electoral College, which would override the wishes of voters in Pennsylvania. .

“You could call for a special election,” Ellis said. “You can lead the way of your constituents. You have a variety of constitutional options, but one option shouldn’t be to ignore it and certify a corrupt and hopelessly compromised election.

Ellis later acknowledged that there was an established process for selecting voters in Pennsylvania, then appeared to suggest that because the election had been corrupted – an unfounded claim – the procedure no longer applies.

“Even though you have a way your voters are typically selected in Pennsylvania, and it worked for the last presidential election,” she said, “it’s an election that got corrupted. And so you cannot use this method. The legislature is the entity authorized in the Constitution that chooses the manner. You can take back this power at any time. “

Since the election, lawyers for the Trump campaign have filed more than three dozen lawsuits aimed at overturning election results in various states, and hardly any of them have prevailed, or even passed preliminary hearings. Notably, they refrained from alleging fraud or corruption in court records, where lawyers making bad faith claims may be subject to penalties. Wednesday’s “hearing” included a witness who said a polling officer refused to tell him whether to insert his ballot face up or face down in the scanner, and an observer who said his Democratic counterparts gave him a nasty look. Allegations that Republican observers were too distant to accurately monitor the processing of ballots – which have already been raised and rejected in court – have been broadcast repeatedly.

Donald Trump supporters
Supporters of President Trump applaud as the Pennsylvania Senate Majority Policy Committee holds a public hearing on Wednesday. (Samuel Corum / Getty Images)

The allegation that some 700,000 more mail-in ballots were counted than had been distributed is a problem that has surfaced. “You sent out, in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, one thousand eight hundred and twenty-three, one hundred and forty-eight ballots by mail or by mail,” Giuliani said, (presumably a piece of tongue for “1,823,148”).

“You got 1.4 million, or so. However, in the president’s tally, you counted 2.5 million. I don’t know what explains the difference of 700,000 between the number of ballots you sent out and the number of ballots in the count. “

That would be prima facie evidence of something wrong, except that Giuliani’s premise appears to be completely wrong. On October 13, The Associated Press reported that “three weeks before the November 3 election, more than 2.6 million registered voters requested a postal vote in Pennsylvania. (Emphasis added.) The day after the election, Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar announced that more than 3 million mail-in ballots had been returned and were being counted.

Giuliani, supporting Ellis’ recommendation, told the panel: “Since this is your only constitutional right and authority, you can still assume the constitutional authority you have delegated.” The power for a state to go retroactively to its own procedures is not explicitly stated in the section of the Constitution on which Ellis and Giuliani relied. Congress, under the Constitution, sets the date by which voters are to be chosen. This year, it was November 3, which means that voters have already been chosen.

Further, these claims appear to be at odds with federal law, which gives states until December 8 to determine the winner of the popular vote, a decision that must be made in accordance with state laws as they existed on. polling day. On December 14, the nation’s voters will vote in their respective states. These votes are sent to the newly elected Congress, which will count the votes on January 6.

Doug Mastriano
Pennsylvania State Senator Doug Mastriano, who chaired Wednesday’s meeting of the Senate Majority Policy Committee. (via Reuters TV)

In previous interviews with Yahoo News, experts have said that appointing their own voters by state legislatures is unlikely to be successful, especially in the absence of credible evidence of widespread fraud.

If there is a dispute over electoral votes in Congress, the House and Senate meet separately and vote on which set of electoral votes to count, according to electoral expert Adav Noti, of the Campaign Legal Center and Group of national work on electoral crises. If they disagree, there is a final tie-breaker provision in federal law that says state-certified electoral votes are the votes that are counted.

While the Trump campaign’s lawsuits continue to fail, Trump himself seems to view electoral strategy as a path to victory. CNN reported On Wednesday evening, President Trump invited Republican lawmakers to the White House audience and is expected to meet with them.

Trump apparently tried to do this in Michigan. Last Friday, he met with Michigan House Speaker Lee Chatfield and Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey at the White House in what was seen as an attempt by Trump to convince lawmakers to GOP to cooperate with a plan to override the will of Michigan voters, where President-elect Joe Biden won by more than 150,000 votes.

After the meeting, lawmakers issued a joint statement saying they intended to “follow the law and go through the normal process for Michigan voters.”

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