Newly sworn-in Brooklyn and Staten Island Congresswoman Nicole Malliotakis said Monday that she plans to stand with other Republicans their efforts to review election results for fraud and overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential race.
During a Monday appearance on Kevin McCullough Radio, the Bay Ridge representative explained that she was in the same camp as a dozen or so other Republicans, led by Senator Ted Cruz, who on Wednesday will seek out fraudulent votes and challenge the results to achieve a second term for President Donald Trump, as first reported by SILive.com.
“It may not be enough votes to overturn the election, it may be. It may be 10 votes, it could be 10,000 votes or 100,000 votes. What this is about is the integrity of the system ensuring that every vote that’s counted is a legal one, and we need to ensure that those votes that are not counted,” Malliotakis said. “That’s what this really is about more than anything. So, you know, I don’t see a situation in which I don’t object to at least some of these states, but I’m going to be thoughtful and mindful and listen to the entire debate on Wednesday.”
According to Malliotakis, the city’s only Republican congressional representative, COVID-19 may be the biggest culprit in her party’s claims that mass voter fraud changed the direction of the election, with governors adjusting election procedures while the pandemic still raged across the country.
“Whether there’s enough widespread fraud to change the election to have a different outcome is, is really irrelevant in the overall view of this, we really want to get down to is what occurred here,” Malliotakis added. “There were states that changed their laws via governor executive orders and that would be unconstitutional. There are a lot of concerns about, you know, all the different types of ways ballots were harvested and collected with the changing rules for the accommodation of the virus. And so there’s, there’s a lot of questions and I think it just needs to be a transparent discussion.”
Likening the presidential election to a football game, the southern Brooklyn congresswoman said it was worth a “replay.”
President-elect Joe Biden defeated Trump in the Nov. 3 election. Biden secured more than 81 million votes across the country, while Trump won 74 million votes. In the electoral college, Biden won a majority of votes over the outgoing president, gaining 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232, and all 50 states certified that result during the Dec. 14 meeting of the Electoral College.
Trump, his campaign and his most ardent supporters on Capitol Hill, however, refuse to acknowledge Biden as president-elect. In the weeks since the election was called for the former vice president, the Trump campaign embarked on a spree of more than 60 court challenges, all but one of which were defeated — including by some Trump-appointed federal judges.
The cases were largely based on conspiracy theories and false voting fraud claims parroted by Trump and his followers — but all of which failed to have any substantial proof, or meet any legal muster.
Despite the challenges of Malliotakis and others, none of them are expected to change the final outcome. Biden will take office as president at noon on Jan. 20, 2021 — when Trump’s term in office expires, per the Constitution of the United States.
This story first appeared on AMNY.com.
