Judicial Watch Statement on the Disputed Presidential Election

Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton issued the following statement today regarding the presidential election:

Joe Biden is not “president-elect.”

Changing results after Election Day raises significant legal and constitutional concerns, and President Trump should use available legal and constitutional remedies to help ensure the election results can be trusted by the American people.

It is not normal for multiple states to be counting presidential votes for days after Election Day. And it raises significant concerns about the validity of post-election counts.

Meanwhile, the media, including social media like Twitter and Facebook, are inaccurately labeling Biden is president-elect. No official sources have called the election. Federal law and the Constitution limit official sources to state officials, the Electoral College, and, ultimately, Congress.

Judicial Watch has long warned of the chaos and increased risk of fraud from recklessly mailing 100 million ballots and ballot applications. Our most recent research, in September, revealed that 353 U.S. counties had 1.8 million more registered voters than eligible voting-age citizens. In other words, the registration rates of those counties exceeded 100% of eligible voters. The study collected the most recent registration data posted online by the states themselves. This data was then compared to the Census Bureau’s most recent five-year population estimates, gathered by the American Community Survey (ACS) from 2014 through 2018. ACS surveys are sent to 3.5 million addresses each month, and its five-year estimates are considered to be the most reliable estimates outside of the decennial census.

In Pennsylvania, our litigation to clean up dirty voting rolls there uncovered 800,000 “extra” names on the rolls. In fact, Pennsylvania state and county authorities gave conflicting numbers about their registration list numbers to a federal court.

Federal law seems clear that the presidential contest was supposed to be decided by Election Day. For example, 3 U.S. Code § 1 states:

The electors of President and Vice President shall be appointed, in each State, on the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November, in every fourth year succeeding every election of a President and Vice President

On Election Day, President Trump had the votes to win the presidency. These vote totals were changed because of unprecedented and extraordinary counting after Election Day.

The state legislatures of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona have independent constitutional authority to resolve presidential election disputes. And Congress has the ultimate authority to accept or reject electors.

In the meantime, Judicial Watch today launched a comprehensive investigation into the election controversy under state and federal freedom of information laws.

Thankfully, the Constitution does not give the media the ability to declare the winner of a presidential election.

Judicial Watch is a national leader for cleaner elections.

In 2018, the Supreme Court upheld a voter-roll cleanup program that resulted from a Judicial Watch settlement of a federal lawsuit with Ohio. California settled a federal lawsuit with Judicial Watch and last year began the process of removing up to 1.6 million inactive names from Los Angeles County’s voter rolls. Kentucky also began a cleanup of hundreds of thousands of old registrations last year after it entered into a consent decree to end another Judicial Watch lawsuit.

In 2020, Judicial Watch sued North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Colorado for failing to clean their voter rolls, and sued Illinois for refusing to disclose voter roll data in violation of federal law.

You can learn more about Judicial Watch’s election efforts here.

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