A congressman who supported the Texas election-fraud lawsuit rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court says the election fight isn’t over.
However, Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., who was part of an election lawsuit in Louisiana two decades ago, said in an interview with the New Yorker that Trump’s legal team may not have had enough experience in election fraud challenges.
“I was a young volunteer in a big election lawsuit in Louisiana in the late 90s. What I learned is that election fraud is hard to prove. You have to have precision, and to do it in a very short time frame. And you have to have evidence beyond refute, and affidavits by witnesses that have credibility,” he explained.
“I don’t know. It’s a question, not a statement, but did they have enough lawyers who had experience in election-fraud challenges?” he said. “This is not to blame anyone.”
Johnson noted that normally election fraud cases center on only one race, but in 2020 it was “happening across the country all simultaneously, and you had this very short window to prove it, and it was a scattershot, shotgun approach by necessity, and, because of that, it wasn’t successful.”
Win in Wisconsin
Trump’s lawyers and their allies have brought several dozen lawsuits based on witness affidavits of election fraud. Some charges state officials allowed election tabulators to violate laws. The Texas case charged that in four battleground states, lawmakers and officials illegally changed elections regarding mail-in voting, opening the door to fraud. But the Supreme Court ruled Texas didn’t have standing to bring the complaint.
President Trump scored a victory in court Monday that could allow Republicans to challenge tens of thousand of ballots in Wisconsin, which Biden officially won by about 20,000 votes.
The state Supreme Court ruled that state and local election officials erred when they gave blanket permission allowing voters to declare themselves homebound and skip voter ID requirements in the 2020 election, Just the News reported.
State officials argued COVID-19 forced them to skip voter ID requirements.
The court said: “We conclude that both the contention that electors qualify as indefinitely confined solely as the result of the COVID19 pandemic and the declared public health emergency and the contention that Wis. Stat. § 6.86(2)(a) could be used for those who ‘have trouble presenting a valid ID’ are erroneous because those reasons do not come within the statutory criteria.”
‘Lingering question’
Johnson said the Electoral College vote Monday, giving Biden a 306-232 victory, “doesn’t mean that the 126 Republican House members who signed on to the Texas case are ready to accept Biden’s victory.
He said the issue is the meaning of the Constitution’s Electors Clause, Article II, Section 2, Clause 1, which delegates to state legislatures the authority to name electors.
Virtually all states now award their votes based on the popular vote, but the Constitution gives to state lawmakers the power to appoint electors they believe will reflect the will of the people.
“We wanted the court to resolve it, not just for the current election cycle but for all elections in the future. I was a constitutional-law attorney and litigator for 20 years before I got to Congress. We used to debate about the nuances of meaning, but this is arguably some of the clearest phraseology in the Constitution itself. It says it is only state legislatures that can set the rules for choosing electors. Because they denied the case on standing, we now have this lingering question mark over this really important interpretation of the Constitution. Many people will contend in the years to come that, because of the court’s silence, it is O.K. now—after two centuries—to play fast and loose with the rules,” Johnson said.
“What happened in 2020, occasioned by COVID, is that public officials—in many cases, well-intentioned ones—tried to expand the ways we do elections. But the key point is that so much of it was done by other kinds of officials—governors, secretaries of state, judges—not the legislatures themselves. The Framers were very careful about making that safeguard in the Constitution. And, when you deviate from that, it opens a Pandora’s box to this kind of chaos,” he said.
Johnson said there’s a “giant question mark” hanging over the 2020 election that will cause “a lot of chaos and confusion.”
“I saw a new poll: a huge amount of the country doubts the election and thinks it was stolen from Donald Trump. Thirty-six per cent of registered voters in America believe the election was stolen. That is a problem. Whether it was stolen or not, the fact that such a huge swath of the country believes that it was is something that should keep all of us up at night,” he warned.
He said all legal cases to be heard and remedies should run their course.
“There are pending cases still out there. They may all be dismissed by the appellate courts, and probably in short order. But until that time has come, we have to let it run its course. And I would say that even if I were on the other team. Our overriding concern is that there is a lot of angst and concern out there about the system itself, and if we short-circuit this, and, say, the magic date of December 14th came, and you still have cases in the system, that upsets a large swath of the country even more, because they feel even more disenfranchised,” he said.
The Las Cruces Sun-New reported a new lawsuit was launched this week over New Mexico’s decision to count ballots from drop boxes.
It alleges that New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver violated state election law by permitting voters to deposit completed absentee ballots in drop boxes.
The state GOP had sued before the election, citing the lack of monitoring and the laxness of security. But the case was dropped when state officials assured county officials there were no issues.
Attorney Sidney Powell said in an interview Sunday with the Epoch Times she has filed cases in Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona based on “massive fraud in every manner and means you can think of.”
“But especially insidious and troubling is the machine fraud conducted through the Dominion voting systems. In fact, one of our experts says Dominion fraud was 5% higher votes for Biden across the board everywhere there was a Dominion machine running. The same was true for other Democrats that were running on the tickets in those states,” she said.
In fact, a forensic audit of Dominion machines in Michigan found extraordinarily high levels of failure.
Powell said there hasn’t even been time to look at all the instances of fraud that need to be reviewed but there’s no doubt that fraud took place.
“People who say there’s no evidence are just lying through their teeth, or they’re deliberately ignorant, or willfully blind to the truth. Frankly, they’re part of the problem. A lot of the people who are saying there’s no evidence are part of the problem and know damn well that all this happened, and may have even instigated it, benefited from it, paid for it, encouraged it,” she charged.
She said the failure of the Texas case will have no impact on her cases, since her plaintiffs are electors “who have constitutional standing in the electors and elections clause of the Constitution.”
She said the Supreme Court needs to rule on the merits of the election fraud allegations “or we don’t have a Supreme Court.”
And she pointed out the failure of the recount processes.
“They often ran the same ballots through the same fraudulent creating machines, which did absolutely no good whatsoever. They did not look at each ballot and compare the signatures,” she said.
Powell charged that state elections officials in five states stopped counting in the middle of election night so they could determine the number of votes needed for Biden to win.
“And that’s why it’s absolutely absurd to say that there wasn’t voter fraud here. We have counterfeit ballots, we have dead people voting, and by the thousands, if not hundreds of thousands. There was something someone called ‘phantom voters.’ There were just more manner and means of fraud than any law abiding American citizen could possibly imagine. It’s stunning. It’s absolutely stunning. They were so in our face with it. And then to deny it is purely Machiavellian,” she said.
She said some of the fraud were so blatant that they simply counted every Biden vote at a value of 1.25 while diminishing the value of Trump votes to .75.
“So they flip 25% of the votes for Biden automatically, every vote count. Instead of a vote counting as one, which is all a vote should ever count as—one man, one vote. That’s our standard, long held rule; the only way it can work in a democratic republic,” she said. “We can see in some of the readouts, that’s exactly what happened.”
Asked why nearly every lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign and his allies, she said it’s because “the corruption goes deep and wide.”
“They have threatened people’s lives, they have threatened people’s children,” she replied.
This article appeared originally on WND.
