1/ I want to briefly tease out Cruz's statement, which will help set expectations about what might happen January 6:

2/ At its heart, the presser states, "we intend to vote on January 6 to reject the electors from disputed states as not ‘regularly given' and ‘lawfully certified' (the statutory requisite), unless & until that emergency 10-day audit is completed."
3/ How does a10-day emergency audit happen? Congress would need to enact a statute to amend the Electoral Count Act before January 6, when it's compelled by law to meet. That seems unlikely.
4/ Cruz et al. seem to hold a "thick" view of the Electoral Count Act, adhering to the "statutory requisite," which means that Congress would need to amend or adhere to the statute.
5/ A 10-day audit is impossible under the current statute. Objections to a state are limited to 2 hours' debate. Adjournments are fixed in the statute, too--no recess if you've hit five days: https://t.co/uvgCoIGR6X
6/ Cruz et al. appear to seek to raise a compound objection: the electors' appointments were not "lawfully certified," & that their votes were not "regularly given." These are, I think, best understood as two separate questions.
7/ If objection is that the appointment was not "lawfully certified," then elector has not been appointed. That may take them out of the denominator of the 12th Amendment determining whether a candidate "majority of the whole number of electors appointed" https://t.co/NalCPhsJaa
8/ If the vote was not "regularly given" (as Boxer & Tubbs raised in 2005) then it may simply mean that the appointment is valid, but there is no vote for the candidate, & a candidate still needs 270 electoral votes to win.
9/ (I say "may," because these are all questions Congress has not had to answer in the past &, at times, steadfastly refused to answer.)
10/ In 1969, the objection was to a Nixon elector in North Carolina who cast a vote for Wallace--that his vote was not "regularly given," excluding that vote from the overall count. (I think this is the best way to way to understand the Greeley votes in 1873, too.)
11/ Of course, Cruz, Hawley, & everyone else recognizes this is performative. Congress will count 306 votes for Biden-Harris, & 232 votes for Trump-Pence. It's only a question of how Congress gets there, & what precedents it raises.
12/ One last detail, the presser is coy about "disputed states." Unclear if that's going to be 1, 7, 51, or whatever.

More from Law

This is what he wants to do.

No matter how this trial plays out, the US will remain divided between those who choose truth, Democracy, and rule of law and the millions who reject these things.

1/


The question is how to move forward.

My mantra is that there are no magic bullets and these people will always be with us.

Except for state legislatures, they have less power now than they have for a while.

2/

The only real and lasting solutions are political ones. Get Democrats into local offices. Get people who want democracy to survive to the polls at every election, at every level.

It’s a constant battle.

3/

Maybe I should tell you all about Thurgood Marshall’s life to illustrate how hard the task is and how there will be backlash after each step of progress.

4/

Precisely. That's why Thurgood Marshall's life came to mind.

We are still riding the backlash that started after the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

That's why I keep saying there are no easy
This issue was repeatedly highlighted bu Judge Totenberg:

Dominion’s system “does not produce a voter-verifiable paper ballot or a paper ballot marked with the voter’s choices in a format readable by the voter because the votes are tabulated solely from the unreadable QR code.”


Judge also found that Dominion's QR codes are NOT encrypted:

“Evidence plainly contradicts any contention that the QR codes or digital signatures are encrypted,”

This was “ultimately conceded by Mr. Cobb and expressly acknowledged later by Dr. Coomer during his testimony.”

Judge Totenberg said there was “demonstrable evidence” that the implementation of Dominion’s systems by Georgia placed voters at an “imminent risk of deprivation of their fundamental right to cast an effective vote,” which she defined as a “vote that is accurately counted.”

Judge Totenberg found that Dominion Systems inherently could not be audited.

She noted that auditors are severely limited and “can only determine whether the BMD printout was tabulated accurately, not whether the election outcome is correct.“

Totenberg stated in her ruling that a BMD printout “is not trustworthy” and the application of an Risk-Limiting audit (RLA) to an election that used BMD printouts “does not yield a true risk-limiting audit.”

Georgia used RLAs to claim no fraud...

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