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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – US Senator Ted Cruz said on Saturday he will lead a campaign by nearly a dozen Republican senators to challenge President-elect Joe Biden’s victory when the Electoral College results are counted in Congress on Jan.6, a largely symbolic measure that there is virtually no chance of preventing Biden from taking office.
Cruz’s effort challenges Republican Senate leaders, who have argued that the Senate’s role in certifying the election is largely ceremonial and sought to avoid a lengthy debate in the room about the outcome.
In a statement, Cruz, the US Senator from Texas, and the other 10 senators said they intend to vote to reject voters from states that have been at the center of President Donald Trump’s unproven claims of voter fraud. . They said Congress should immediately appoint a commission to conduct a 10-day emergency audit of the 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 necessary,” they said.
It was not immediately clear which states would be subject to the proposed audit, Cruz’s office said.
Michael Gwin, a spokesman for Biden’s campaign, dismissed the move as a theater that is not backed by any evidence.
“This stunt will not change the fact that President-elect Biden will be sworn in on January 20, and these baseless claims have already been scrutinized and dismissed by Trump’s own attorney general, dozens of courts, and election officials from both parties.” ” he said.
Pushing for an audit is a political stunt that won’t affect the election outcome, said Derek Muller, a law professor at the University of Iowa.
Muller said that while the 1887 law governing how legislators 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 houses would need to support the audit, and there is virtually no chance the proposal will have that level of support, he said.
Biden beat Trump by a margin of 306-232 in the Electoral College.
Under the Electoral College system, “electoral votes” are assigned to the states and the District of Columbia according to their representation in Congress.
Trump has been encouraging Republicans to prevent Biden from taking office, although there is no viable mechanism for them to do so.
Legal challenges by Trump and his allies in court to overturn the election results have met with resounding failure. On Friday, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by Representative Louie Gohmert that sought to allow Vice President Mike Pence, who is presiding over the congressional count, to declare Trump the winner on January 6.
The effort by Cruz and other Republicans comes days after US Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri became the first sitting member of the Senate to announce that he would challenge the election result. Several Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives also plan to challenge the vote count.
Cruz was joined in the statement by Senators Ron Johnson, James Lankford, Steve Daines, John Kennedy, Marsha Blackburn, Mike Braun, along with Senators-elect Cynthia Lummis, Tommy Tuberville, Bill Hagerty and Roger Marshall, all of whom will be sworn in. in as senators on Sunday in the new Congress.
Several Republican senators have said they do not support any effort to derail the Electoral College’s vote certification.
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the top Senate Republican, acknowledged Biden’s victory on December 15 and urged other Republicans to refrain from objecting on January 6.
Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, from the swing state of Pennsylvania, criticized Cruz and others for undermining voters’ willingness to elect their leaders, saying Trump’s loss in his state is due to declining suburban support for the already president. loss of support in most rural counties, not fraud.
“I intend to vigorously defend our form of government by opposing this effort to disenfranchise millions of voters in my state and elsewhere,” he said.
In Cruz’s statement, the senators said they did not necessarily expect his tactic to be successful.
“We are not naive. We hope that most, if not all Democrats, and perhaps more than a few Republicans, will vote otherwise,” they said.
Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, said in a statement Saturday that lawmakers have the right to raise their objections.
“The Vice President welcomes the efforts of members of the House and Senate to use the authority they have under the law to raise objections and present evidence to Congress and the American people on January 6,” Short said.
(Reporting by Jason Lange, Tim Gardner, Jan Wolfe, Trevor Hunnicutt, and Valerie Volcovici; written by James Oliphant; edited by Noeleen Walder, Diane Craft, and Daniel Wallis)
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