Democrats and even some Republicans are warning of a challenge, despite Boxer’s precedent. In an interview with CNN, Boxer said the circumstances are totally different this year, when Trump and his allies are trying to overturn the national election result, than when she joined then Democratic MP Stephanie Tubbs Jones in Ohio to oppose the loss of Kerry.
“Our intention was not to annul the election in any way. Our intention was to focus on repressing voters in Ohio,” said California’s Democratic retiree, who says her objection was her proudest moment on the Senate floor. “They are talking about the vote that the presidency was stolen from Donald Trump. It is not even a close comparison.”
Congress will count the votes of the Electoral College in a joint session of Congress on January 6, which represents Trump’s final chance to try to overturn the electoral result he lost to Biden. In reality, Trump’s Republican allies have virtually zero chance of changing the outcome, only to delay Biden’s inevitable claim to being the winner of the Electoral College and the next president.
“I believe we have several senators, and the question is not whether, but how many,” Brooks said last week.
Brooks said Republicans are preparing to challenge Biden’s victory in up to six states, which would force a dozen hours of debate in the House and Senate, turning Biden’s victory count into a political circus.
Senator GOP leaves the door open for objections
To force a vote to contest the results of a state’s election, however, a senator must join a member of Congress in writing to oppose the results. McConnell, who acknowledged Biden’s victory, warned his conference not to join the Republican Party’s House effort and to force the Republican Senate Party conference to take a politically toxic vote on whether they are on Trump’s side or not.
But Tuberville, who defeated former Trump attorney general Jeff Sessions in Alabama’s Republican primaries, left the door open last week for objections to the Electoral College results. Tuberville’s comments prompted Trump to tweet several stories about the new Alabama senator potentially challenging McConnell and speak to him over the weekend.
“He said, ‘You made me the most popular politician in the United States,'” added Trump. “He is great.”
If Tuberville or another senator adheres to the House’s objections, the two chambers would split up and debate each state’s objections for two hours before the vote. Because Democrats control the House, the effort effectively has zero chance of success, and even in a Republican-controlled Senate, several Republicans said there was no widespread fraud.
“In the Senate, it would go down like a gunshot,” South Dakota Sen. John Thune, the Senate’s second Republican, said last week. “I just don’t think it makes much sense to put everyone in this situation when you know what the end result will be.”
Previous objections have failed without Senate support
The joint session to count the Electoral College votes on January 6 will be led by Vice President Mike Pence, who attended the White House meeting on Monday with Trump and House Republicans, raising questions about how he will handle the embarrassing situation to affirm Biden’s victory over his own presidential passage.
It is the same position that former Vice President Al Gore faced in 2001, after his superficial defeat for Bush, which resulted in a contested recount in Florida. During that vote, House Democrats protested the Florida result, but no objection from the senator, and the effort died.
This also happened in 2017, when a group of House Democrats opposed Trump’s victory in several states, citing interference in Russia’s elections and problems with electoral repression. No senators joined the House, however, and Biden – who was presiding over the session in his role as Senate president – dropped and rejected the objections, certifying Trump as the winner.
“We were trying to draw attention to Putin’s (Russian President Vladimir’s) efforts to undermine and sabotage the American election,” said Maryland deputy Jamie Raskin, one of the Democrats who raised an objection in plenary in 2017. ” Certainly there is far more evidence of Vladimir Putin’s cyber attacks on the DNC and the (Hillary) Clinton campaign and efforts to manipulate American public opinion through social media than there was of any fraud or corruption in the 2020 elections. ”
Republican House leaders cited previous Democratic objections, including Boxer and House Democrats’ objections in 2017, to justify the race for Biden’s victory next month.
“If any Republican has done this, it clearly has not been the first time this has happened,” said minority president Steve Scalise, who has not yet recognized Biden as president-elect last week. “All Republican presidents in the past three terms have been challenged by Democrats.”
‘People wanted to strangle me’
Boxer said that Tubbs Jones, who died in 2008, persuaded her to join the 2005 objection, showing her the problems that have occurred with Ohio votes, including queues of hours at the polls, broken urns and high provisional ballot rejection rates in African American communities in the state.
“This objection is not rooted in the hope or even the suggestion of nullifying the president’s victory,” Tubbs Jones said in the plenary of the House when the two chambers separated for the debate. “But it is a necessary, timely and appropriate opportunity to review and remedy the most precious process in our democracy.”
In the Senate, Boxer’s Democratic colleagues supported the resolution of voter suppression problems. But when it came time to vote, only Boxer voted to support the protest. She lost 74-1.
In the House, the vote was 267-31 against the objection, and Ohio’s votes were counted.
“It was one of my proudest moments, even though I was alone,” Boxer told CNN. “I was very unpopular that day in the Senate – people wanted to strangle me.”
Weeks after raising the objection of the Electoral College, Boxer and Tubbs Jones joined the then senator. Hillary Clinton will introduce new voting rights legislation, although she has not advanced in the Republican-controlled Senate.
“Looking back, I think we were very prescient because, after that, things got even worse with the suppression of voters,” said Boxer. “We hoped that our position would open the stage for legislation, but we could never complete it in the Republican Senate. We just couldn’t get it out.”
CNN’s Manu Raju, Ali Zaslav, Daniella Diaz and Kaitlan Collins and Sarah Westwood contributed to this report.