Pennsylvania Lawmakers Formally Introduce Resolution to Dispute 2020 Elections Results

Republican state lawmakers in Pennsylvania on Monday introduced a resolution to dispute the results of the 2020 election. The text of the resolution, first previewed in a memo on Nov. 27, states that the executive and judicial branches of the Keystone State’s government usurped the legislature’s constitutional power to set the rules of the election. “Officials in the Executive and Judicial Branches of the Commonwealth infringed upon the General Assembly’s authority under the Constitution of the United States by unlawfully changing the rules governing the November 3, 2020, election in the Commonwealth,” the resolution states. The resolution calls on the secretary of the Commonwealth to withdraw the “premature certification” of the presidential election and delay certifying other races, declares the 2020 election to be in dispute, and urges the U.S. Congress “to declare the selection of presidential electors in this Commonwealth to be in dispute.” Members of the Pennsylvania General Assembly said in a statement, “A number of compromises of Pennsylvania’s election laws took place during the 2020 General Election. The documented irregularities and improprieties associated with mail-in balloting, pre-canvassing, and canvassing have undermined our elector process and, as a result, we cannot accept certification of the results in statewide races.” They added, “We believe this moment is pivotal and important enough that the General Assembly needs to take extraordinary measures to answer these extraordinary questions. We also believe our representative oversight duty as Pennsylvania’s legislative branch of government demands us to re-assume our constitutional authority and take immediate action.” The proposed text lists three steps taken by the judicial and executive branches to change the rules of the election.

First, on Sept. 17, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court “unlawfully and unilaterally” extended the deadline by which mail ballots could be received, mandated that ballots without a postmark would be treated as timely, and allowed for ballots without a verified voter signature to be accepted, the resolution says. Second, on Oct. 23, upon a petition from the secretary of the commonwealth, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that signatures on mail-in ballots need not be authenticated. And third, on Nov. 2, the secretary of the commonwealth “encouraged certain counties to notify party and candidate representatives of mail-in voters whose ballots contained defects,” the resolution says. All of the changes are contrary to the Pennsylvania Election Code, which requires mail-in ballots to be received at 8 p.m. on Election Day, mandates that signatures on the mail-in ballots be authenticated, and forbids the counting of defective mail-in ballots. The resolution also lists a variety of election irregularities and potential fraud, including the issues brought up by witnesses during the hearing before the Pennsylvania Senate Majority Policy Committee on Nov. 25. “On November 24, 2020, the Secretary of the Commonwealth unilaterally and prematurely certified results of the November 3, 2020 election regarding presidential electors despite ongoing litigation,” the resolution states. “The Pennsylvania House of Representatives has the duty to ensure that no citizen of this Commonwealth is disenfranchised, to insist that all elections are conducted according to the law, and to satisfy the general public that every legal vote is counted accurately.” Pennsylvania State Sen. Doug Mastriano, a Republican, said Friday that the GOP-controlled state legislature will make a bid to reclaim its power to appoint the state’s electors to the Electoral College, saying they could start the process on Nov. 30. “So, we’re gonna do a resolution between the House and Senate, hopefully today,” he told Steve Bannon’s War Room on Friday.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/pennsylvania-lawmakers-formally-introduce-resolution-to-dispute-2020-elections-results_3599100.html

PA Resolution

https://beta.documentcloud.org/documents/20418113-diamond-language-hr1094

Arizona Lawmakers Call for Resolution to Hold Back Electoral College Votes

At a public hearing in Arizona with select members of the state legislature and members of President Donald Trump’s legal team, lawmakers called for their colleagues to back an upcoming resolution that would hold off the release of the state’s electoral colleges votes. Arizona state Rep. Mark Finchem told reporters during the Nov. 30 hearing that they hope to have a resolution “within the next 24 to 48 hours.” The state holds 11 electoral college votes. “We are clawing our electoral college votes back, we will not release them,” Finchem said. “That’s what I’m calling on our colleagues in both the House and Senate to do—exercise our plenary authority under the U.S. constitution.” “There is a legal brief out there that says we are not tethered to state statute when it comes to this one question,” he added. According to Finchem, the move would be easy to do and would be legally binding. “A simple majority can call the House and Senate back, and in a day can pass a resolution and cause those electoral votes to basically be held,” he added. “And it is binding—I’ll see y’all in court.” In total, nine Republican state lawmakers attended the meeting. They had requested permission to hold a formal legislative hearing at the Capitol but were denied by the Republican House speaker and Senate president, according to The Associated Press. Trump’s attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, alongside witnesses, appeared in front of members of the Arizona Legislature alleging that considerable voter fraud occurred in the state. They also pushed for the GOP-majority state House and Senate to hold a vote on the certification of the election.

During the hearing, a cybersecurity expert said that the user manual for Dominion Voting Systems machines guides users on how to connect to the Internet, and that the machines, used by multiple states, were connected to the Internet during the election. “The Dominion suite user manual is about an inch and a half thick. My team went back through the user manual and looked at all the instances where in the user’s manual, it tells operators to connect the ethernet cords to the router, and it is, the systems are connected to the Internet,” Phil Waldron, a cybersecurity expert and retired Army Colonel said. “Our teams looked at spirographs on the Dominion network on Election Day and showed the increased web traffic, Internet traffic on Election Day for Dominion servers,” he said, adding: “In a nutshell, these systems are not what you’ve been told, if you’ve been told anything. “They are connected to the Internet. There is no transparency of how the voter information is processed, moved, and stored. And, as a matter of fact, these companies have refused to allow any type of inspection into their code and they always decry, it’s our IP, it’s IP protection.”

In 2016, Trump won the state’s 11 electoral votes by less than 100,000 votes. In the 17 presidential elections between 1952 and 2016, only one Democratic candidate won Arizona—Bill Clinton in 1996. Arizona’s secretary of state on Nov. 30 certified the state’s presidential election results. Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, said in a press conference that despite the pandemic and other complexities, “we had an extremely well-run election and saw historically high voter participation.” During the hearing, a volunteer poll observer and worker in Arizona’s Pima County told GOP Arizona State legislators that she had been told by state election officials to allow people to vote who may not have been properly registered to vote in Arizona on Election Day. “I was having to allow people to vote who literally had just moved here. A large percentage had addresses from two apartment complexes,” Anna Orth said. Orth remarked that “many” of these individuals were “residents for not more than a month,” adding that from her observations, she estimated that about 2,000 people appeared to be out-of-state voters. According to Pima County’s elections website, people can vote if they have “live[d] within Pima County at least 29 days prior to the general election.” These people, she said, had “out-of-state drivers licenses” but attempted to show proof they could vote by presenting an “electric bill” or another kind of bill that suggested they lived in the precinct. Orth then alleged she had spoken to a poll observer who said he was from Los Angeles and told her “he was there to turn Arizona blue,” meaning Democratic.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/arizona-lawmakers-call-for-resolution-to-hold-back-electoral-college-votes_3599250.html