Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said Sunday that he believes legislators have an obligation to assess whether election fraud occurred in the 2020 presidential election because many voters believe it did.
“That’s bad for the legitimacy of any subsequent presidential elections, and so dismissing these claims, I think, does real violence to our democratic system,” Cruz told Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures.” “We ought to have a serious fair process and tribunal to consider these claim — consider them quickly, consider them expeditiously — and we can do it in 10 days before the inauguration.”
Cruz and 10 other Republican senators announced Saturday that they would oppose the Electoral College certification of President-elect Joe Biden when a new Congress first meets on Jan. 6.
The senators’ announcement comes after Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley announced Dec. 30 that he planned to oppose certification. (RELATED: Trump May Already Be The 2024 GOP FrontRunner, Poll Shows)
Speaking of his plan, Cruz said he and his colleagues “will, together, object to certification in order to force the appointment of an emergency electoral commission to perform an emergency audit of the election results to assess these claims of fraud.”
Cruz insisted that an audit could be accomplished “in 10 days before the inauguration, but I think we have an obligation to the voters and we have an obligation to the Constitution to ensure that this election was lawful.”
Federal election officials have continued to deny allegations of widespread voter fraud raised by President Donald Trump’s campaign after issuing a Nov. 12 statement that called the 2020 election the “most secure in American history.”
The Trump campaign and Republican surrogates have filed around 40 lawsuits trying to overturn the election results since Nov. 3 without winning a single one for lack of evidence. The Washington Post reported that 86 judges going all the way from state courts to the U.S. Supreme Court have thrown out legal challenges from the Trump campaign.
Many of these judges were appointed by either Trump or a previous Republican president, according to Business Insider.
On Sunday, Cruz encouraged the political rhetoric of the hour to cool and that “everyone needs to calm down … This is already a volatile situation. It’s like a tinder box and throwing lit matches into it.” (RELATED: Here’s What Happens When Congress Votes To Certify The Election On Jan. 6)
President Donald Trump walks to the Oval Office while arriving back at the White House on December 31, 2020 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
The senator noted that when he announced his intention of encouraging an election audit, “I had multiple, multiple Democrats urging that I should be arrested and tried for the crimes of sedition and treason. That’s not helpful at a time when this country when we’re pitted against each other, just relax and let’s do our jobs.”
He suggested an election commission would be pivotal in “reestablishing trust in our democratic process, and I believe that should be a bipartisan objective.” Although Cruz suggested political division might make that impossible right now, he insisted that “Democrats should be interested in Americans having confidence in our electoral system just as much as Republicans should be.”