Tom Rice, the republican congressman from S. Carolina surprised many by his “yes” vote on the impeachment of Trump. His reasoning was spot on:
//”Once the violence began, when the Capitol was under siege, when the Capitol Police were being beaten and killed, and when the Vice President and the Congress were being locked down, the President was watching and tweeted about the Vice President’s lack of courage.
“For hours while the riot continued, the President communicated only on Twitter and offered only weak requests for restraint …//
However, he was also one of those republicans opposing the Electoral College certification. He said that he thought the election was “unfair”. The example he cited was the rule changes in Pennsylvania shortly before the election making the Pennsylvania election “unfair”. The most cited “change” in the rules was the acceptance of mail-in ballots up to 3 days after the election day. The SCOTUS will deliberate and decide on this issue some time in the future. The election results in Pennsylvania were certified with the exclusion of ballots received after the election day. So whatever the decision of SCOTUS, the certified results will not be affected.
This type of election rules “unfairness” controversy is not new. There have long been controversies about election rules “fairness” and are not specific to 2020 election. Using this as a reason to oppose Electoral College results is just a Trump/GOP tactic to delegitimize the 2020 election results.
Historically, GOP has been using “election integrity” as their main argument in advancing voter ID laws. The Democrats on the other hand use “voter suppression” as their main argument against those voter ID laws. For historical reasons, many bona-fide citizens of the minority groups and poor people find it hard to comply with these voter ID laws. In the 2020 election, the pandemic impacts the voters unevenly among the supporters of both parties. Restrictions put on mail-in ballots would have unfairly affected the election result. In the end, whatever rule changes made in the states for this election were legally made. This fact was confirmed by the more than 60 court decisions, even by judges appointed by Trump. Any dispute about the fairness of the election rules are just opinions and should not be put forward as a reason to nullify the duly certified election results.
Besides the election rules, there were accusations of fraud circulated among the media. When it comes to court hearing, many of these so-called “evidences” were not admissible in court. Most of them were not bona-fide evidence because of them being rumors and hearsay. Or the number of votes affected by these “fraud” claims were too small to be significantly change the election results. In the phone call between Trump and the SOS of Georgia, Trump also refer to those as “rumors” and asked if the SOS had looked into them. Brad (the SOS of Georgia) actually provided answers to many of these “fraud” claims in his news conference. The fraud claims about the voting machines/software were all refuted by recounting. The conspiracy theories about these machines/software will soon face the scrutiny of the courts as these election software/hardware companies are suing some prominent figures disseminating these theories.
Human errors and irregularities do occur in every election. Bill Barr has said this in his statement about election fraud. All these conspiracy theories tried to gain their credibility by mixing some of these errors/irregularities in their “evidence” and greatly magnify and expand their significance. A lot of the already biased general public were misled by those misinformation. Just like today, more than 60% of the GOP people think the Capitol Riot was carried out by Antifa elements. Unfortunately, Trump and GOP have taken up disinformation and conspiracy theories as their political weapon. This is the most evil legacy of DJ Trump!!