Congressman says 2020 election leaves America facing 'chaos'

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.

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Congressman says 2020 election leaves America facing ‘chaos’
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