President Donald Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani said Sunday that legislatures in three states that Trump lost could wind up deciding who votes in the Electoral College — likely sending the election issue to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In an interview on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” Giuliani says he believes the legislative bodies in Georgia, Michigan, and Arizona are poised to take votes on electors.
In Georgia, he asserted, “they started a petition to hold their own session, which they're allowed to do under the Constitution.
“They're the first legislature to do this now. This is a constitutional role that the founding fathers gave to our legislatures. They're the ones who are supposed to select the president, not the governors, not the board of elections. They're the ones who have the constitutional obligation to decide on the electors.”
“Michigan is considering the same thing,” Giuliani claimed. “They're not quite as far along, but they are drafting something right now, and so is Arizona, so those three … could very well end up in front of the legislature to decide who the electors are.”
Giuliani said in Wisconsin, there’s a lawsuit that “basically says if you don't have an application for the [absentee] ballot, the ballot doesn't count.”
“There are some 50-or-60,000 ballots without applications, they would have to be thrown out and that would change the election,” he claimed.
“If any of these state legislatures change the electors based on their own analysis, of course that'll be taken to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court will have to decide if it was done reasonably, rationally, or arbitrarily that's the standard,” he said.
“In each case, each one of these legislatures has more than enough of that to sustain the Supreme Court challenge,” he claimed.
Giuliani’s strategy was outlined as Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito asked Pennsylvania officials to file response briefs to an effort by Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., to flip the state’s election results.
Kelly is hoping to get the nation’s high court to take up the same election case the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has already rejected.
His 50-page filing was submitted to Alito, who oversees cases from the Third Circuit, which includes Pennsylvania, the legal website, Law&Crime, reported. A hearing was requested for Tuesday. Pennsylvania’s members of the Electoral College are due to meet Dec. 14.
According to Law&Crime, Kelly’s arguments center on a pre-COVID-19 pandemic state election reform law that created a “no-excuse mail-in” voting regime that he claims violates the state constitution.
Kelly argues people have to vote in person unless they can take advantage of only a few, narrow excuses contained within the state constitution — and that the 2019 reform law should be struck down as invalid, the website reported.
Though the Supreme Court doesn’t strictly have jurisdiction to settle Pennsylvania constitutional issues, Kelly argues the state is acting under a “direct grant of authority” from the U.S. Constitution, which gives the high court the right to jump in.