Kelli Ward Arizona GOP chairwoman

 Capitol Media Services 2019

PHOENIX β€” The head of the Arizona Republican Party, Kelli Ward, is suing Vice President Mike Pence in a bid to give the election to President Trump.

Legal papers filed Sunday and Monday in federal court in Texas seek to void laws that give the ultimate authority to Congress to decide which Electoral College delegates’ votes should be counted.

Election employees processing and verifying ballots at the Pima County Election Center in Tucson on Nov. 4, 2020. (Josh Galemore / Arizona Daily Star)

Ward wants the court to order that Pence has, and must exercise, unilateral power to decide which β€œslate” of electors from Arizona and other β€œdisputed” states should be counted β€” or if none of the electoral votes for Biden from Arizona should be counted at all.

The lawsuit is another last-ditch effort to put Arizona’s 11 electoral votes into Trump’s column despite the popular vote giving Joe Biden 10,457 more votes than the incumbent in the Nov. 3 election.

This new claim tries to have it declared that Pence β€” and only Pence β€” gets to decide which electoral votes count.

The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Texas because another of the plaintiffs is U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican.

He intends to make a motion when Congress convenes on Jan. 6 to count the electoral votes to not accept the official results from Arizona, setting the stage for the legal showdown Ward seeks to provoke.

The lead attorney in the Texas case is William Sessions, who served as director of the FBI from 1983 to 1993 when he was dismissed by President Clinton amid allegations of ethical improprieties.

Central to the litigation is the Twelfth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The first step is electors in each state cast their votes for president. That is what occurred here and in all other states Dec. 14, giving Biden 306 electoral votes against 232 for Trump.

Then Congress meets in joint session on Jan. 6 to certify the count. All that is normally routine, with the vice president, as presiding officer of the Senate, running the show.

When Gohmert objects to counting the Arizona slate of electors for Biden and to Biden slates from other states in which some Republicans have refused to accept the results, that would trigger Ward’s legal theory based on the second part of the Twelfth Amendment.

It says β€œthe president of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted.”

The lawsuit contends Pence can decide if a competing β€œslate” from a state should instead be counted.

That, in turn, plugs into a maneuver engineered by Ward: Even as the official Biden-pledged Electoral College delegates were casting their votes for him in Phoenix on Dec. 14, she had a separate slate of Republicans, including herself, casting their own votes for Trump in an unofficial and unsanctioned event.

That means there are Trump-pledged β€œdelegates” ready to be recognized and have their votes counted should Pence choose them.

The lawsuit says another option would be for Pence to decide that neither slate gets to vote because of questions about the election. That, in turn, could leave both candidates with fewer than the 270 electoral votes needed for election.

In that scenario, federal law sets up a procedure for both the U.S. House and Senate to review the vote. But if they can’t agree, then the default is to count the votes as each state certified them, meaning Biden would get Arizona’s 11 electoral votes.

Ward’s lawyers, however, contend the Twelfth Amendment then gives the decision solely to the U.S. House.

But a House vote is not individual by lawmakers in the Democrat-controlled chamber. It’s by state.

There are more states with Republican-controlled congressional delegations than those where Democrats make up the majority. And that means if each state delegation cast one vote, and that vote reflected the political makeup of that delegation, Trump would get another four years in office.

Pence is named as a defendant because the lawsuit seeks to bar him from exercising his authority on Jan. 6 in any way but the manner that Ward’s lawsuit demands.

This lawsuit and others by Ward and Trump supporters are not the only way they have been seeking to overturn the official results of the Arizona election.

Ward is also the plaintiff in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court where she wants the justices to grant her more time to review what she claims are questionable ballots in Maricopa County.

That effort was rebuffed by judges in lower courts, who not only said there was no evidence that further review would change the outcome, but that they had to decide the issue by Dec. 14, the date that Arizona’s 11 officially chosen electors cast their votes for Biden.

Ward contends that deadline is unconstitutional. But the high court is not expected to even look at her complaint until Jan. 14, eight full days after Congress makes the final count of the electoral votes.

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