Wyoming Sen.-elect Cynthia Lummis has signed on to a letter with 10 current and future Republican senators that calls on members of Congress to reject last year’s Electoral College results and audit a number of so far unproven allegations of voter fraud. The Electoral College voted in Democratic President-Elect Joe Biden’s favor on Dec. 14.
Led by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, the letter calls on members of the Republican-led Senate to reject the results of the election until a 10-day emergency audit can be conducted into what Cruz called “unprecedented allegations of voter fraud, violations and lax enforcement of election law, and other voting irregularities.”
The full list of signees includes some of the U.S. Senate’s most conservative members, including sitting Sens. Ron Johnson, James Lankford, Steve Daines, John Kennedy and Marsha Blackburn, who were joined by Sens.-elect Lummis, Mike Braun, Roger Marshall, Bill Hagerty and Tommy Tuberville.
“We are not naïve,” the letter reads. “We fully expect most if not all Democrats, and perhaps more than a few Republicans, to vote otherwise. But support of election integrity should not be a partisan issue. A fair and credible audit — conducted expeditiously and completed well before January 20 — would dramatically improve Americans’ faith in our electoral process and would significantly enhance the legitimacy of whoever becomes our next President. We owe that to the People.”
People are also reading…
Lummis’ support comes despite previously recognizing former Vice President Biden’s victory in last year’s election.
“Some states clearly have a lot of work to do to clean up their elections but the Electoral College is above the fray that played out in certain states,” she said at the time. “The Electoral College works, just as America’s founders intended. It is on those states to fix their election process and mend the national confidence in the integrity of our elections.”
So far, nearly every legal case alleging voter fraud in the 2020 elections have been rejected by the courts. Outgoing Attorney General William Barr, whose Department of Justice investigated many of those claims, has stated on the record that there has been no evidence to support a level of fraud that would have affected the final result of the election. Meanwhile, heavily scrutinized states like Georgia have conducted their own election security audits in places like Cobb County, finding no irregularities that would have affected the final result.
While Republican leadership — including Senate Majority Floor Leader Mitch McConnell and Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso — have come to recognize Biden’s victory, some members of the party have remained defiant, holding on to a distant hope the election could be overturned in favor of sitting Republican President Donald Trump. Lummis had previously urged the president not to concede the election until all of his legal options had been exhausted.
Challenges to certifying the Electoral College vote are not unprecedented. Following the 2004 and 2016 presidential elections, some Democratic members of Congress attempted to challenge results favoring Presidents George W. Bush and Trump, respectively. Those efforts failed to gain any mainstream traction, however.
In recent weeks, however, support for the president’s quixotic bid to supplant the Electoral College has become something of a litmus test among hardline conservatives. Over the weekend, a lawsuit filed against Vice President Mike Pence by Texas Republican Congressman Louie Gohmert aiming to give Pence the authority to overturn the results of the election was rejected on similar grounds, while Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley — to the chagrin of some of his Republican colleagues — has continued to push his colleagues to reject the Electoral College’s result.
A similar phenomenon has taken root in Wyoming. On New Year’s Eve, the Wyoming Republican Party sent a letter to the state’s Washington delegation urging them to reject the result of the election, while some conservative members of the Wyoming Legislature have expressed disappointment in Gov. Mark Gordon’s decision not to sign onto a quickly rejected lawsuit filed by the state of Texas challenging the final result.
“This is not about winning and losing. This is about being on the right side of history,” read the letter, penned by Wyoming GOP Chairman Frank Eathorne. “This is about assuring the 70% of Wyoming voters who voted for President Trump see that you are in their corner. This is about taking the action the majority of our Wyoming Republican constituents have demanded. If the efforts are unsuccessful, Joe Biden will have to enter the White House with a well-earned stain of illegitimacy, which will hamper his efforts to advance the Democrat’s socialist agenda.”
The vote to certify the results of the election will take place Wednesday.
Nick Reynolds
Politics Reporter
Nick Reynolds covers state politics and policy. A native of Central New York, he has spent his career covering governments big and small, and several Congressional campaigns. He graduated from the State University of New York at Brockport in 2015.
