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  • 2020-12-23 (xsd:date)
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  • Can Veep Play the 'Pence Card' and Reject US Election Results? (en)
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  • On Dec. 23, 2020, the hashtag #pencecard started trending on Twitter as social media users urged U.S. Vice President Mike Pence to use the power they claimed he had to reject the results of the 2020 presidential election: Despite the popularity of this hashtag, there is no Pence Card to play. For starters, this piece of copy-pasted text claimed that Pence had to act before the 3rd Wed. of Dec, but this rumor didn't go viral until the evening of December's fourth Wednesday. Looking past this simple error, however, we find that this rumor is based on a genuine item in the U.S. legal code, although it doesn't say what the Pence Card rumors claim. This rumor stems from a provision of the U.S. legal code (3 USC 12) that deals with the Failure of certificates of electors to reach the President of the Senate. This provision explains that if a state fails to deliver a certificate of its vote to the U.S. vice president, who also serves as president of the Senate, or the archivist of the United States, then the vice president or the archivist shall request the state's secretary of state send the certificate of votes by the most expeditious method available. Here's the full text of this provision: This provision does not give the vice president the authority to reject votes certified by the states. It only says that the vice president shall attempt to expedite the process if states fail to deliver their certification of votes on time. Furthermore, this provision states that the vice president can only get involved in this process by the fourth Wednesday in December if the president of the Senate or the archivist of the United States does not receive a state's certificate of votes. The archivist of the United States, however, has already received certifications of votes from all 50 states and Washington, D.C, for the 2020 general election. These certificates can be viewed online here, where the National Archives explains: (The Office of the Federal Register) posts the Certificates of Ascertainment and the Certificates of Vote, as soon as possible, after receiving them from the States and District of Columbia. Here is the certificate of vote from Pennsylvania, one of the states that was unsuccessfully contested by Trump's legal team: The Associated Press investigated a similar claim in December 2020, holding that Pence had the authority to reject or accept the results of the 2020 election on Jan. 6. While Pence, as the president of the Senate, will preside over a joint session in Congress to count the electoral votes, his role is simply to open and count the votes, not to determine their validity. The Associated Press writes: To sum up: A provision in the U.S. legal code says that if a state fails to deliver a certification of vote to the vice president or the archivist of the United States by the fourth Wednesday of December, that person shall request that the state's secretary of state provide these certifications in an expeditious manner. This provision does not, however, grant the vice president the power to reject votes that were certified by the states. (en)
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