WASHINGTON, D.C. – A rarely used process that Republicans including Ohio’s Jim Jordan plan to use to challenge the electoral vote count in Congress on Jan. 6 in hopes of returning President Donald Trump to the White House was last tried by former Cleveland Democratic Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones in 2005.
But Tubbs Jones, who died in 2008, had a different motive. Rather than seeking to overturn the election, she delayed the official presidential vote to highlight problems that plagued Ohio’s 2004 election, such as computer glitches, long voting waits in Cuyahoga County, and questions about procedures used to reject provisional ballots. Still, it was a controversial move that touched off a fierce debate.
Before Tubbs Jones’ protest, the constitutionally mandated session to certify the Electoral College vote had been disrupted only one other time since 1877: when a North Carolina elector who was supposed to support Richard Nixon in the 1968 presidential election instead voted for independent George Wallace.
To protest acceptance of a state’s electoral votes, one U.S. House of Representatives member backed by a U.S. Senator must object when the votes are being tallied. After debating the matter, both chambers must agree to reject the votes.
Any efforts by Jordan or others to challenge this year’s vote are unlikely to prevail, since the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives wouldn’t be inclined to overturn Democrat Joe Biden’s victory. Biden has 306 electoral votes compared with 232 for Trump, and no evidence of widespread election fraud has emerged, despite claims by Trump and his allies.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell has tried to discourage those in his caucus from signing onto such efforts, but a cadre of Trump-supporting Republicans in the House of Representatives say they want to try challenging this year’s electoral votes in several states that backed Biden.
“I’m quite confident that if we only counted lawful votes cast by eligible American citizens, Donald Trump won the Electoral College,” Alabama Republican Rep. Mo Brooks told Fox News without indicating which U.S. Senator might assist him.
Brooks has said he plans to challenge the electoral votes of several states on the House of Representatives floor, and Champaign County’s Jordan says he plans to support those efforts. Jordan has also attended rallies in Pennsylvania to claim the election was being “stolen” from Trump, and last week signed onto a Supreme Court brief to back a lawsuit that Texas filed to throw out election results from Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia, states that helped Biden clinch the election.
The Supreme Court rejected that case, and courts have tossed out dozens of other Trump-backed lawsuits to overturn the election results. But Trump continues to make baseless accusations of widespread fraud in the election.
In contrast, Tubbs Jones stressed her protest wasn’t meant to overturn the results of the 2004 contest won by Republican George W. Bush. Rather, it was meant to air Ohio election problems on the House of Representatives and U.S. Senate floors.
The drama played out as former GOP Rep. Bob Ney of St. Clairsville asked to certify Ohio’s electoral votes during a joint meeting of Congress presided over by then-Vice President Dick Cheney. Tubbs Jones formally lodged her protest with backing from California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer. Boxer said she signed onto the complaint from Tubbs Jones because she wanted to “focus the light of truth on these terrible problems in the electoral system.”
“I raise this objection neither to put the nation in the turmoil of a proposed overturned election nor to provide cannon fodder or partisan demagoguery for my fellow members of Congress,” Tubbs Jones said. “I raise this objection because I am convinced that we as a body must conduct a formal and legitimate debate about election irregularities.”
Cheney ordered both chambers to recess for two hours of debate in the form of a series of dueling speeches, each no longer than five minutes.
Ohio Democrats including Sen. Sherrod Brown – who was then a member of the U.S. House of Representatives – used their time to highlight problems that occurred during the 2004 election.
“Ohio voters should never again be forced to wait 3, 5, sometimes even 10 hours to cast a vote,” said Brown, a former Ohio Secretary of State. “Ohioans should never again, as too many people did this November, lose their right to vote. But it is not just about Ohio; it is not just about who won and who did not. It is about our system of democracy. Mr. Speaker, I am saddened that no Republicans in this body are joining us today in acknowledging problems in Ohio and in working with us to fix those problems because, Mr. Speaker, defending the right to vote should be a concern for Republicans and Democrats alike.”
The state’s Republicans minimized problems with the election and criticized Tubbs Jones’ effort. Sen. Rob Portman – who was also in the House at that time – called it “a cynical political ploy to try to somehow delegitimize the Presidency of the United States.” (After this year’s election, Portman supported Trump’s right to file legal challenges, but after last week’s Electoral College vote, he acknowledged Biden as the president-elect.)
“No election is ever perfect. they never are,” said Portman at the time of the Tubbs Jones challenge, noting that Bush won Ohio by more than 118,000 votes in 2004. “But there is absolutely no credible basis to question the outcome of the election. That is what is going on here today.”
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine – who was then a Republican U.S. Senator, called Democrats’ charges about the election in Ohio “wild, incoherent and completely unsubstantiated.” (Like Portman this year, he said Trump had a right to file challenges, but he acknowledged Biden as the winner earlier than Portman did.) The other Ohioan in the U.S. Senate at the time, Republican George Voinovich, said Democrats were “desperate to create uncertainty and a partisan issue where none exists.”
That year’s unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, missed the debate because he was touring the Middle East. Unlike Trump, who has mounted numerous legal challenges to this year’s election results which have been rejected in court, Kerry told supporters in an email that his lawyers “found no evidence that would change the outcome of the election.” He also said he hoped Congress would address ways to remedy voting problems.
Current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who then led the House Democratic minority, said the members of Congress who brought the challenge were “speaking up for their aggrieved constituents, many of whom may have been disenfranchised in this process.” She called it “their only opportunity to have this debate while the country is listening.”
Election officials in Ohio acknowledged that some voters faced long lines or were accidentally dropped from voter rolls, and that some counties had electronic voting machine glitches. But they insisted the problems were minor, typical of any election, and did not affect the final result. A spokesman for then-Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, a Republican, disputed claims that Ohio Democrats made during the debate, including those that the state rejected a disproportionate number of provisional ballots.
“The fact of the matter is that Ohio election officials performed admirably on Nov. 2,” Blackwell spokesman Carlo Loparo said at the time.
Despite Democrats’ support for Tubbs Jones’ cause, few colleagues voted with her in the end to invalidate the Ohio electoral results. Boxer was the only senator to support the resolution, and it failed in the House 267-31, with 132 members not voting. Former Cleveland Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich was the only Ohioan to join Tubbs Jones with a “yes” vote. The joint session then resumed, and Congress, without further disruption, certified the rest of the results. The outcome: Bush won 286 electoral votes to Kerry’s 251.
The following month, Jones joined Boxer and then-New York Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in introducing the Count Every Vote Act, which proposed wide-ranging electoral reform. It would have made the distribution of misleading election information a federal crime, declared Election Day a national holiday and required a paper ballot back-up for every electronic vote to be used to assist recounts. The Republican-controlled Congress didn’t act on their bill.
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