Upstate N.Y. congresswoman will object to certifying presidential election results
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) plans to object to the certification of last year’s presidential election on Wednesday when Congress meets to make those results official.
The upstate Republican announced the move Monday morning on her congressional website, saying she will “object to certain contested electors on Jan. 6.”
Stefanik will join dozens of other Republicans in Congress who plan to call into question the Electoral College vote when they convene Wednesday to formally ratify it, but their efforts most likely will be in vain.
President-elect Joe Biden won the election both through the popular and electoral vote, but it hasn’t stopped President Trump and his GOP allies from making unfounded claims that the election was rigged in Biden’s favor.
Several challenges of the election results have failed in court due to lack of evidence.
Despite that, lawmakers like Stefanik plan to move forward with their objections.
“I do not take this action lightly,” she said in her written statement Monday. “Tens of millions of Americans are rightly concerned that the 2020 election featured unprecedented voting irregularities, unconstitutional overreach by unelected state officials and judges ignoring state election laws, and a fundamental lack of ballot integrity and security.”
Stefanik offered no evidence of “irregularities” or “overreach” in her statement, though.
And her announcement prompted at least one foe to call for her resignation.
“Congresswoman Stefanik has thrown in her lot with those colleagues who seek to violate their constitutional oath to ‘protect and defend’ the Constitution by seeking to overthrow the legitimately elected incoming president,” Jay Jacobs, chairman of the New York State Democratic Committee, said in a written statement. “[She] knows that there are NO ‘contested electors’ for her to oppose as every state, under THEIR constitutional obligation, has certified the legitimacy of the electors now being sent to the Congress.”
The joint congressional session Wednesday marks the last step in the process before Biden is sworn in at his inauguration Jan. 20.
Most of the time, the session represents a formality dating back to the Founding Fathers — essentially a rubber stamp of all the 538 Electoral College votes that is then entered into the Congressional Record.
This year, Trump and his loyalists in the House and Senate are using it as a platform to continue to challenge the election results in six key battleground states — Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada.
Biden won those states, which contributed to a total of 306 Electoral College votes for him and 232 for Trump.
The only way Trump and his allies can block the certification of the electoral votes is if majorities in both the House and Senate vote to challenge results in the states in question. And that does not seem likely.
Democrats hold a majority in the House of Representatives, and while the Senate is controlled by the GOP, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) last month ordered Republicans to accept the Electoral College vote.
