Joyce will object to vote count
U.S. Rep. John Joyce, R-13th District, plans today to join about 70% of House Republicans in objecting to the tally of electoral votes that — as certified by the states — will give Joe Biden the presidency and denying Donald Trump reelection.
“I’ve worked alongside President Trump from the beginning,” Joyce said in a phone interview Tuesday.
“This weekend, we made the decision to continue the fight.”
Joyce will object specifically to Pennsylvania’s count, based on “oversteps by the (state) Supreme Court and the governor and his administration” that trespassed on the General Assembly’s prerogative for establishing election procedures, Joyce said.
He cited the Supreme Court’s granting of a three-day grace period after Election Day for mailed ballots to arrive, its ordering that a postmark no later than Election Day be presumed if there was doubt and that signature matching couldn’t be a reason for discarding of ballots.
“A basic disregard for security measures,” Joyce said. “I can’t in good faith certify an election (conducted) under an unlawful process.”
His constituents have “overwhelmingly” encouraged him to object to the count, he said.
Given that overturning the election result requires a majority of both congressional chambers and given that there’s a Democratic majority in the House, the effort is bound to fail.
But if the effort could give the election to Trump, “I would go for it,” Joyce said.
The “grace period” was granted to avoid disenfranchising voters due to postal delays and the effects of the coronavirus, and the ballots received during that period numbered only about 10,000 — far less than the 81,000 vote edge for Biden in Pennsylvania, wrote governor’s office spokeswoman Lyndsay Kensinger in an email.
A Trump-appointed federal judge ruled that signature comparison was neither authorized nor required by the state’s election code, Kensinger added.
Asked how he can square objecting to the results of an election in which Republicans did well, Joyce said, “the American people made it clear they were for common-sense conservative values.”
Pressed to make the distinction between legitimate ballots that helped Republicans win and allegedly illegitimate results that defeated Trump, he focused on “Philadelphia, where so much of the disparity was.”
Actually, the swing from Trump to his opponent in Philadelphia between 2016, when he won, and 2020, when he lost, was less than 7,000 votes, according to a map on the WHYY website.
Asked to comment on Trump’s weekend call in which he browbeat Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” enough votes to overturn that state’s certified results, Joyce said, “the Democrats continue to look for opportunities to attack the president.”
“I don’t know what John Joyce is accomplishing, besides feeding into what at this point feels like a tantrum” from Trump, said Gillian Kratzer, chairman of the Blair County Democratic Committee.
One aim of the effort today is to help ensure the integrity of future elections, Joyce said.
“This is just more of the same nonsense and another loosely veiled attempt to disenfranchise voters,” Kensinger wrote. “These attacks against the core values of Americans are intended to undermine our democracy, and we must reject them.”
Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 814-949-7038.