A bipartisan team of lawyers from across the USA compiled a 1,000-page briefing on voting eligibility for Congress members, who are due to give their final ruling on the Electoral College vote on Friday. The much more populated Republican side of the aisle booed or called out “order!” following each denied objection. But, after the election and before the Electoral College vote ol’ Horace gave up the ghost and 63 of his 66 pledged electoral candidates cast their votes for someone else. Without that, Vice President Joe Biden quickly overruled each objection. Denver-area Congressman Ed Perlmutter indicated he might object during the vote count, but then quickly abandoned the idea. Trump received 62,979,636 popular votes while Hilary Clinton received 65,844,610 popular votes, a difference of 2,864,974 votes.
Advertisement
Also, since it’s up to the states to choose electors and most states have a “winner take all” policy, it’s possible for a person to become president having lost the popular vote. In their objections, they cited Russian meddling in the election, questions about the electors and state laws requiring voter identification. It didn’t stop President George W. Bush’s re-election, but it made a symbolic point that Democrats were willing fight for Americans’ voting rights.
Trump and Pence are to be sworn in on January 20. The representative was joined by several house members who opposed Trump’s win due to voter-suppression tactics in states. Only four Democratic senators attended the ceremony.
Biden had to repeatedly gavel down several House Dems on the floor, because as Biden said, “The objection can not be entertained”. “Is the objection in writing and not only signed by the member but by a United States senator?” he said.
“I don’t care that it is not signed by a senator, ” Waters said 16 years ago.
In the world’s greatest democracy, there’s no longer any reason to put a geographic thumb on the voting scale in presidential elections.
“Today I was the first member of Congress to rise and formally object to the certification of this presidential election”.
Advertisement
Besides the odd Russian connection, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by almost 2.9 million voters. But they have been powerless to change the outcome. Some argued that the electors were not lawfully certified in some states while others complained about voter suppression and Russian interference in the election. The effect is that it’s up to each state to decide which candidate gets its electoral votes. They saw what was happening in the last two weeks before the (election) and knew they were in big trouble – which is why they cancelled their big fireworks at the last minute.
