A Democratic presidential elector from Colorado asked a federal judge for permission to intervene in a “last ditch” lawsuit filed by a Republican congressman who claims Vice President Mike Pence has the power to unilaterally reverse President Donald Trump’s election loss.
Rep. Louie Gohmert argues Pence can hand Trump a second term by simply rejecting swing states’ slates of Democratic electors and instead choosing competing GOP electors when the Senate and House meet jointly on Jan. 6 to open and count certificates of electoral votes from all 50 states.
In a filing Thursday, Democratic elector Alan Kennedy argues that competing slates of electors cannot be chosen because they do not exist. The states can only choose one set of electors — and the swing states at issue already did so — for President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, Kennedy said.
The vice president has the constitutional role of presiding over the Senate, which has traditionally included overseeing the formal acceptance of the Electoral College vote.
“If an incumbent vice president could keep his or her job that way, then votes of millions of people and votes of duly elected and certified electors would be meaningless, and our nation’s most cherished principle — ‘here, We the People rule’ — would be eviscerated,” Kennedy said.
Gohmert’s lawsuit echoes Trump’s debunked claim that Biden won the election only through rampant voter fraud perpetrated by thousands of corrupt Democratic officials and election workers. Some members of Congress have signaled they will object during the joint session, though not enough to block Biden’s win.
“The fact that a few members of Congress plan to oppose electoral votes cast for President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris, for purely partisan reasons, adds no support for plaintiffs’ false claims of ‘competing slates of electors’ and ‘substantial voter fraud’ in this election,” Kennedy said.
