TYLER, Texas (KETK) — In the latest federal court filings over Rep. Louie Gohmert’s lawsuit against Vice President Mike Pence, the East Texas congressman asked a federal judge on Friday to allow Pence to unilaterally decide disputes over states’ electors during a joint session of Congress to certify the presidential election next week.
Gohmert stated that the court should find Pence to be able to:
- Decide how to handle disputes when a member of the House objects to a state’s electors or between “two slates of competing electors presented for any single state.”
- This can mean that the Vice President can choose which electors count at his discretion or completely disregard electors from any state.
If enacted, it would essentially mean that the sitting Vice President could decide on his or her own how to award electors, regardless of how a state certified their results.
Pence responded on Thursday night asking Judge Jeremy Kernodle, a President Trump appointee, to throw out the case, calling the lawsuit a “walking legal contradiction.”
Attorneys for the U.S. House of Representatives also filed a brief asking for the case to be dismissed.
“The House also has a compelling interest in ensuring that the public’s confidence in the processes for confirming the results of the 2020 Presidential election is not undermined by this last-minute suit.”
U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Gohmert also claimed that the election was rife with voter fraud and that it was “impossible to state who won from the mail-in votes because legal ones have been commingled with illegal ones.”
It has been shown multiple times in court, including in front of multiple Trump-appointed judges, that there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud or that there were large cases of illegal mail-in ballots.
The congressman also argued that the COVID pandemic “systemically eroded ballot-integrity measures like signature or witness requirements.” The State of Georgia, one of the “contested states” in Gohmert’s lawsuit, requires two signature matches, even during the pandemic.
Matches occurred with the absentee ballot application and the returned ballot envelope before being counted. After three separate recounts, Georgia certified Biden as the winner.