OPINION:
The un-American committee in the U.S. House of Representatives formed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi to ostensibly investigate the Capitol riot of Jan 6, 2020, has buried the lede. In trying to demonize members of Congress for raising questions about the veracity of the 2020 presidential election, it has attempted to link congressional members to rioters.
At first, the attempt to tie Congress and former President Donald Trump to the rioters was done to distract Americans from the questionable circumstances in every battleground state.
Now it is being used to try and distract Americans from inflation, economy, border insecurity and a myriad of issues that are crushing the nation.
Protecting the will of the voters sometimes requires us to look at our voting system to make sure it has integrity. Simply saying that we had the best and cleanest election in history does not make it so.
Claiming that people who questioned the 2020 presidential outcome are treasonous and insurrectionists is a lie as well.
A constitutional republic that purports to protect political speech would allow all people to express their opinion. Just like we allowed Hillary Clinton, Jamie Raskin, Maxine Waters, Adam Schiff and others to claim that Mr. Trump was not a legitimate president — even after their allegations that Russia colluded with Trump to steal the election were debunked by their own investigation.
Unlike their claims, assertions of irregularities in the 2020 election, particularly in Arizona, have not been debunked. Election integrity remains a high priority to all Americans.
After the November 2020 presidential election, widespread anomalies and irregularities were reported many people wanted audits and reviews of the election.
In Arizona, the Judiciary Committee in the State Senate held a hearing to query the veracity of the election. After hearing the witnesses and testimony the committee voted to institute a forensic audit.
Calls were made for the Arizona governor to delay the certification of the presidential electors, but he certified.
Members of Congress were trying to accumulate information on allegations of improprieties surrounding the election and looked for legal means to delay the congressional tally on Jan. 6, 2021.
Having observed Democrats use the 18 — such and such law to question every Republican presidential campaign victor in this century, Republicans decided to object to the seating of electors. I was asked by many members of Congress what, if any constitutional question, did I have about the election. At that point, there were at least two salient problems that needed to be resolved. Later, additional problems would emerge.
The Constitution gives states the authority to set the date, time, and manner of all elections. The Arizona Legislature had established the deadline for registering to vote. The federal courts upheld the Oct. 5, 2020 deadline as being constitutional, yet allowed approximately 40,000 people to register to vote after the deadline. Regardless of how these individuals registered or voted, their votes were illegal.
Further, I was given hundreds of affidavits by researchers who found many bad addresses, many voters not at the locus, and otherwise ineligible to vote. Several thousand voted, representing several thousand potential fraudulent votes. If fewer than 6,000 changed, the election would have gone the other way.
Using the federal statute, which has never been challenged on constitutional grounds, 141 Republicans, including me, and several U.S. senators objected to the seating of Arizona’s electors.
That wasn’t to disenfranchise, it was to protect legal votes from legal voters.
Former Vice President Mike Pence appropriately called for a debate on the issue at the Jan. 6, 2021, joint session of Congress. Democrats in both Houses voted to ignore the questions and certify Arizona’s electors.
Since that day there have been a number of additional questions about Arizona’s elections have arisen.
It was reported that more than 19,000 early ballots in Maricopa County were counted even though they were not timely received.
The chain of custody of between 100,000 and 200,000 votes was lost according to the Arizona Attorney General’s report. That means that those ballots were effectively lost for some period of time.
True the Vote and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza made a documentary film alleging systematic ballot harvesting and drop box stuffing in Maricopa County of tens of thousands of ballots.
In parts of Arizona, for instance, in Yuma County, a San Luis resident recently pleaded guilty to harvesting and ballot trafficking, exactly as described in D’Souza’s movie, 2,000 Mules.
Additionally, the audit requested by the Arizona State Senate has never been completed because auditors were denied access to certain data and digital records by Maricopa County.
And there are additional issues that are unresolved, and problematically, unaddressed as well.
A regular question I receive at town halls, tele-townhalls, and when meeting with my constituents is whether the 2022 election will be fair. That is an artifact from the questions surrounding the 2020 election.
The vast majority of my Republican colleagues in the U.S. House of Representatives had pertinent concerns that we raised on Jan 6, 2021. Many remain unresolved today.
• U.S. Representative Andy Biggs represents Arizona’s Fifth Congressional District. He serves on the House Judiciary and Oversight committees.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.