President Trump on Tuesday falsely claimed that Vice President Mike Pence has the power to reject electors when the Electoral College vote is certified later this week, continuing a pressure campaign the president has slowly increased in recent days.
“The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors,” Mr. Trump falsely claimed on Twitter.
As president of the Senate, Mr. Pence is expected to preside over the pro forma certification of the Electoral College vote count in front of a joint session of Congress on Wednesday. It is a constitutionally prescribed, televised moment in which Mr. Pence will name the winner of the 2020 presidential election, Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Mr. Trump has been trying for days to press Mr. Pence to use his procedural role in the event as an opportunity to change the outcome of the election.
It is also a moment some of Mr. Pence’s advisers have been bracing themselves for ever since Mr. Trump lost the election and stepped up his baseless claims of widespread voter fraud. During a rally in Georgia on Monday night, Mr. Trump openly pressured Mr. Pence for the first time to satisfy his demand that the results be changed to benefit him.
Mr. Pence’s aides have said he will follow what the Constitution prescribes. But that Mr. Trump is now turning on an ally who has been among the most deferential to him over four years is a predictable final act of his presidency.
But no matter how distasteful it might be for Mr. Pence, J. Michael Luttig, a former United States Court of Appeals judge and leading conservative legal scholar, said that Mr. Pence had no choice but to simply count the votes.
“No president and no vice president would — or should — consider either event as a test of political loyalty,” Mr. Luttig said. “And if either did, he would have to understand that political loyalty must yield to constitutional obligation.”
House Republicans, with support from Mr. Trump, have also argued in court that Mr. Pence has the right to take matters into his own hands and eliminate electoral votes from any state that he chooses. But a federal judge, who was appointed by Mr. Trump, on Friday threw out a lawsuit the Republicans brought to force the vice president to do so.
“The only responsibility and power of the vice president under the Constitution is to faithfully count the Electoral College votes as they have been cast,” Mr. Luttig said. “The Constitution does not empower the vice president to alter in any way the votes that have been cast, either by rejecting certain votes or otherwise.”
ATLANTA — Georgia’s first crush of Election Day voters braved a bracing January chill Tuesday morning, arriving at polling places to make their choices in a pair of Senate runoff races that are among the most consequential in recent American history.
In liberal-leaning Atlanta, the state capital, Whitney Leonard, 24, walked out Tuesday morning of the West Hunter Street Baptist Church, a precinct in Atlanta’s West End neighborhood. Ms. Leonard, who is Black, said she voted for Democratic challengers Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock. But she said she was not beholden to the Democratic Party.
Ms. Leonard said she felt that President Trump had proved himself immature and erratic, and she believed that Democrats taking control of the Senate was crucial to undoing the damage he had caused.
If Mr. Ossoff and Mr. Warnock defeat the Republican candidates, Senator Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, whose Senate term ended on Sunday, the Democrats would seat 50 senators, giving them an effective majority, as Vice President-elect Kamala Harris could serve as a tiebreaking vote. It would be critical for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. to effectively advance his agenda.
Before the presidential election in November, Ms. Leonard had never voted. Now, Ms. Leonard, who was previously incarcerated, said she was going to vote whenever the opportunity presents itself. “You don’t know how much of a privilege it is to vote until it’s been taken away from you,” she said.
A few miles away at Dad’s Garage, a comedy club in the Old Fourth Ward neighborhood that hosts a polling place, about 20 people were standing outside waiting to vote before the polls opened at 7 a.m.
John Ohrenberger, a 35-year-old sales leader for a tech company, said he voted Democrat down the ticket, as he usually does, to keep Republicans in the Senate from “stymying any progress for the next few years.”
“It’s been a bananas few weeks,” he said, noting it was high time for the seemingly unending political ads to stop.
In Dalton, the northwest city where Mr. Trump held a rally Monday night, a steady flow of Georgians poured into Dalton State College on Tuesday to vote.
Northwest Georgia is a conservative stronghold, and Republicans knew their task was to overcome strong statewide Democratic turnout in early voting and absentee ballots. By Tuesday morning, Mr. Trump’s message to Republicans to get out and vote appeared to be resonating.
“Turnout is high,” said Lane Lewis, 44, as he waited to enter the precinct. “You can tell because there’s never a line.”
The reliance on Election Day turnout is a risky proposition for Republicans, who must contend with Georgia’s changing population and growing urban areas that increasingly vote Democratic. It was also a forced choice, considering much of the Republican base are echoing Mr. Trump’s concerns about voter fraud in the November election, when it comes to absentee voting, and many have expressed similarly unfounded doubts about this race.
Mr. Lewis said he waited until Election Day to vote because he trusted it would be counted then. He also said he believed Ms. Loeffler and Mr. Perdue were going to benefit from Republicans like him, who hold conservative values but have sometimes been off put by Mr. Trump’s rhetoric.
When asked if he thought Mr. Biden won Georgia in November, Mr. Lewis said “I have doubts.”
Some have described their voting choices as a desire for balance or an aversion to having one party controlling two houses of government.
Joy Phenix voted for gridlock. “They need a backstop,” Ms. Phenix, 55, said outside a polling place in the affluent Atlanta suburbs in east Cobb County where a modest line of voters shuffled through all morning. She said she voted for Mr. Perdue and Ms. Loeffler, but that if Mr. Trump had been elected she would have voted for the Democrats.
Jasmine Knapp, a 30-year-old Dalton resident, said she was ready for the flood of campaign texts and television advertisements to end. Ms. Knapp, who declined to say who she supported, described herself as a conservative who voted Republican, but said she had not agreed with how some, like Mr. Trump, had claimed the November election was rigged.
“You always hear every election cycle that this vote matters more than anything — but that feels true this time,” she said.
Rick Rojas contributed reporting.
Two Republican candidates, Senator Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, whose Senate term ended Sunday, are battling to keep their seats in Georgia’s runoff election. If their Democratic challengers, Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock, both win, Democrats will reclaim the Senate majority.
Control of the Senate will effectively set the parameters of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s first two years in office. A Republican-led Senate would complicate his ability to staff his cabinet, pass legislation and advance his political priorities.
Here’s a look at what we know so far.
Early voting data suggests that the races are very competitive. There are some indications that Democrats had a bigger share of the early-voting electorate than they did in the general election, raising hopes for a party that has traditionally been the underdog in runoff races.
The outcome now depends on whether Republicans can overcome the Democrats’ early gains when they head to the polls on Tuesday. Rates of early voting have been lowest in the conservative northwest corner of the state, worrying some Republicans. But others argue that their supporters typically vote in higher numbers on election day and hope that President Trump’s rally on Monday in Dalton, a city in the northwest, will push more Republicans to the polls.
Strategists from both parties remain uncertain on what to anticipate beyond a tight race. Demographic changes have shifted the politics in Georgia, turning the traditionally conservative Southern state into a hotly contested battleground.
In November, Mr. Perdue received 49.7 percent of the vote, just short of the majority he would have needed to avoid a runoff, while his challenger, Mr. Ossoff, had 47.9 percent — a difference of about 88,000 votes. The field was more crowded in the other Senate contest: Mr. Warnock finished with 32.9 percent of the vote and Ms. Loeffler with 25.9 percent.
Modeling the electorate for these rematches is trickier than usual: Never has a Georgia runoff determined the balance of power in the Senate — or been held in the midst of a pandemic.
Yes, there could be yet another round of counting. After multiple vote counts last year, state officials are preparing for all contingencies.
In November, it took a week and a half of counting after Election Day before it was clear that Mr. Biden had won the state.
Republicans are expected to command an early lead on election night, both because the more conservative areas of the state typically report results faster and because votes cast in person, which have favored Republicans during the pandemic, are typically released earlier. Heavily Democratic counties, including the suburban Atlanta areas that helped Mr. Biden win, historically take longer to count votes.
A staggering influx of political spending has flooded the state, as campaign operatives, party officials and outside groups descended on the races. Nearly $500 million has been spent on advertising, according to AdImpact, an advertising tracking firm, saturating the airwaves at previously unheard-of levels.
Two more Republican senators were making plans on Tuesday to object to electoral votes won by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Wednesday when Congress meets to formalize his victory.
Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, plans to object to the certification of Arizona’s Democratic electors, according to a person familiar with his plans. And Senator Kelly Loeffler, Republican of Georgia, intends to object to the electors from her state, according to a person familiar with her thinking.
Mr. Cruz, a possible 2024 presidential candidate, is among 11 senators who have said in recent days that they would challenge the Electoral College results unless Congress agreed to create an independent commission to audit the results. But his earlier statements had been vague as to whether he would lodge a formal objection himself. His plan to object was first reported by The Washington Post.
His decision to do so, along with Ms. Loeffler’s, ensures that the House and Senate will formally debate whether to overturn the results in at least three states, prolonging what is normally a brief, ceremonial session by at least six hours and forcing at least three votes on whether to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory.
Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, plans to object to Pennsylvania’s electors. Neither he nor Ms. Loeffler have ruled out lodging additional objections, and other Republican senators could still join the mix.
House Republicans are preparing to object to another three states — Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin — but under law, they can only force a debate and vote on their challenges if a senator agrees to join them. None are expected to be successful. Majorities of both the House and Senate intend to vote to accept Mr. Biden’s victory despite intense pressure from President Trump to declare him the victor instead of Mr. Biden.
But by objecting, Mr. Cruz and the other Republicans are ensuring that Mr. Trump will get one final, high-stakes stand in the halls of Congress to argue his baseless claims of widespread election fraud. Senate Republican leaders fear it will fracture the party.
The person familiar with Mr. Cruz’s thinking, who requested anonymity, said he was not seeking to overturn the election, but to draw attention to his idea of forming an election audit commission. There is little chance that will happen, and every state in the country has already certified the results after verifying their accuracy, many following postelection audits or hand counts and recounts.
“We are going to vote to object to the electors — not to set aside the election, I don’t think that would actually be the right thing to do — but rather to press for the appointment of an electoral commission that can hear the claims of voter fraud, hear the evidence and make a determination as to what the facts are and the extent to which the law was complied with,” Mr. Cruz said Monday evening in an interview with the conservative radio host Mark Levin.
Georgians head to the polls today for a critical election that will determine whether Republicans retain control of the Senate, just a day after President Trump and President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. converged on the state to campaign for their party’s candidates.
Mr. Trump on Monday appeared alongside the Republican candidates, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, in Dalton, Ga., but remained fixated on his own loss in Georgia in November and continued his pattern of prioritizing his personal grievances over the party’s drive to win the state’s two seats.
“There’s no way we lost Georgia,” Mr. Trump said just after taking the stage. “I’ve had two elections. I’ve won both of them. It’s amazing.”
Monday’s rallies were also shaken by the stunning revelation the day before that Mr. Trump had, in an hourlong phone call with Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, repeated a litany of conspiracy theories and asked Mr. Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” to overturn the will of Georgia voters, who chose Mr. Biden.
The president’s statement fueled anger among Democrats and helped feed the drive to defeat the two Republican candidates. Jon Ossoff, the Democrat challenging Mr. Perdue, drew parallels between Mr. Trump’s effort and the bitter history of disenfranchisement in the state, citing poll closures and cumbersome voting rules.
“The president of the United States on the phone trying to intimidate Georgia’s election officials to throw out your votes,” Mr. Ossoff told supporters at a canvassing event in Conyers, a suburb east of Atlanta. “Let’s send a message: Don’t come down to Georgia and try to mess with our voting rights.”
Mr. Perdue and Ms. Loeffler have closely aligned themselves with Mr. Trump. On Monday, Ms. Loeffler promised to vote against the Electoral College certification process in the Senate on Wednesday, joining a dozen Republican senators in voting to overturn electors for Mr. Biden.
Mr. Trump muscled his way to power by bullying the Republican establishment — and the party’s leaders now worry that he might drag them down with him. Republican turnout has been low in Georgia’s early voting, prompted by skepticism among Mr. Trump’s own die-hards about the validity of the November results.
During a midday appearance at a church in Milner, Ga., Vice President Mike Pence implored Georgia voters to help maintain a Republican majority in the Senate as a “last line of defense.”
In his appearance in Atlanta on Monday, Mr. Biden made no direct mention of Mr. Trump’s telephone call but did obliquely criticize the president’s strongman tactics.
“As our opposition friends are finding out, all power flows from the people,” said the president-elect, adding that politicians cannot “seize power.”
Mostly, though, Mr. Biden, clad in a black mask emblazoned with “VOTE,” encouraged his audience to do just that.
Some of the attendees at the Biden rally waved signs in support of the two Democratic candidates, Mr. Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock, but many indicated that they got involved in the runoffs because they had been galvanized by Mr. Trump.
“We’re supporting democracy because we’ve seen it dwindle these last four years,” said Deshunn Wilkerson, a 36-year-old social worker, who wore a sweatshirt with the pink-and-green letters of the sorority she shares with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, Alpha Kappa Alpha.
Emily Cochrane Maggie Astor and Rick Rojas contributed reporting.
On Wednesday, when Congress conducts what is typically a ceremonial duty of opening and counting certificates of electoral votes, Vice President Mike Pence will play a delicate role.
As president of the Senate, Mr. Pence is expected to preside over the pro forma certification of the Electoral College vote count in front of a joint session of Congress. It is a constitutionally prescribed, televised moment in which Mr. Pence will name the winner of the 2020 presidential election, Joseph R. Biden Jr.
It is also a moment some of Mr. Pence’s advisers have been bracing themselves for ever since the president lost the election and stepped up his baseless claims of widespread voter fraud.
One person close to Mr. Pence described Wednesday’s duties as gut-wrenching, saying that he would need to balance the president’s misguided beliefs about government with his own years of preaching deference to the Constitution.
After nearly a dozen Republican senators said they plan to object to the certification of the vote on Wednesday, the vice president’s chief of staff, Marc Short, issued a carefully worded statement intended not to anger anyone.
“The vice president welcomes the efforts of members of the House and Senate to use the authority they have under the law to raise objections and bring forward evidence before the Congress and the American people on Jan. 6,” he said.
The fact that Mr. Pence’s role is almost entirely scripted by those parliamentarians is not expected to ease a rare moment of tension between himself and the president, who has come to believe Mr. Pence’s role will be akin to that of chief justice, an arbiter who plays a role in the outcome. In reality, it will be more akin to the presenter opening the Academy Award envelope and reading the name of the movie that won Best Picture, with no say in determining the winner.
And with just over two weeks left in the administration, Mr. Pence is at risk of meeting the fate that he has successfully avoided for four years: being publicly attacked by the president.
A federal judge in Atlanta on Tuesday denied a last-minute effort by President Trump to decertify Georgia’s election results, handing the president yet another courtroom loss just one day before Congress is scheduled to bring the presidential race to an official end.
The ruling from the bench by Judge Mark H. Cohen denying the emergency petition brought the number of legal defeats that Mr. Trump and his allies have suffered since Election Day to more than 60. The challenges have spanned eight states and dozens of courts, and have become more desperate as the vote in Congress on Wednesday to formally certify the victory of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has drawn closer.
In a complaint filed just hours before the start of the new year, Mr. Trump and his lawyers asked Judge Cohen to toss the verified results of Georgia’s presidential race, citing a litany of previously debunked fraud allegations. They claimed that officials in Georgia allowed dead people to vote, as well as unregistered voters, convicted felons still serving their sentences, and people who had registered to vote at post office boxes.
Mr. Trump raised many of these false accusations on Saturday in an hourlong phone call in which he pressured Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to help him “find” just enough votes in Georgia to win the election. On Monday, another Georgia state official, Gabriel Sterling, held a news conference rebutting nearly all of Mr. Trump’s false claims.
Judge Cohen denied the president’s emergency request at a brief hearing on Tuesday morning that journalists were blocked from covering remotely. While reporters have covered most of the hearings related to election challenges from Mr. Trump and his allies by either phone or video, Mr. Trump’s lawyers did not consent to allowing public access to the remote livestream of the hearing on Tuesday.
As President Trump has sought to overturn the election results, his personal lawyers paraded themselves before television hosts, state elections officials and anyone else willing to entertain their baseless claims of voter fraud.
But behind the scenes, a longtime conservative lawyer named Cleta Mitchell quietly helped. Her work for Mr. Trump drew widespread attention for the first time over the weekend, when a recording was released of an hourlong call in which Mr. Trump threatened Georgia elections officials with “a criminal offense” if they failed to “find” enough votes to change the state’s presidential results.
On the call, Ms. Mitchell repeatedly jumped in to help Mr. Trump, showing an intimate level of involvement in his efforts as they both made baseless claims about the election and pressed Georgia officials to hand over election data.
Ms. Mitchell is a partner at the law firm Foley & Lardner, which has over 1,000 lawyers and represents large corporations such as CVS Pharmacy. Her presence on the call stood out because Mr. Trump has struggled to attract high-profile lawyers to aid his attempts to overturn the election.
In the day after the audio emerged, Foley & Lardner sought to distance itself from Ms. Mitchell, saying in a statement on Monday that its lawyers were expected to refrain from representing or advising anyone in the election. The firm said it was examining Ms. Mitchell’s role on Mr. Trump’s legal team.
Ms. Mitchell, 70, has maintained a public profile supporting candidates and causes, earning a reputation as a firebrand. She was a leading critic of the I.R.S.’s treatment of nonprofit groups associated with the Tea Party movement during the Obama administration and of state and local coronavirus restrictions that religious groups opposed last year.
During the Trump administration, Ms. Mitchell has also represented the nonprofit of the president’s former chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, which has been scrutinized by federal prosecutors in Manhattan as part of a broad investigation into whether Mr. Bannon defrauded donors.
At one point in the call over the weekend, Mr. Trump brought up a baseless claim about ballots from Atlanta that were for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.
“Does anybody know about it?” Mr. Trump asked.
“I know about it, but —” Ms. Mitchell said before she was interrupted by the president.
“OK, Cleta, I’m not asking you. Cleta, honestly. I’m asking Brad,” Mr. Trump said, referring to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia.
Actually, it’s a trick question: Not a single major telephone pollster conducted a survey in Georgia ahead of the election on Tuesday — partly out of exhaustion after the difficulties of 2020, and partly because of how dicey it always is to poll a runoff election, when turnout patterns become especially difficult to predict.
Not one of the 16 pollsters that have conducted surveys in these races uses the kind of peer-reviewed methods and live-interviewer phone polling that the nation’s top outfits tend to rely upon. The only public poll by a traditional, reputable firm that had been planned got called off in the middle of the process.
Still, based on what polling data is available, the averages suggest that the Democrats have a slight advantage.
Both of the Democrats — Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff — lead the Republican candidates — Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue — by roughly 2 percentage points in the polling averages calculated by FiveThirtyEight.
Republican strategists say their candidates are dealing from a position of strength, pointing to how the Republican candidates earned more votes than the Democratic ones in the general election in November.
Yet Democrats have some reason for cautious optimism, with over 3 million early votes already cast statewide. But, as the outcome in November showed, high turnout does not necessarily spell good fortune for Democrats.
Black voters, who lean overwhelmingly Democratic, appear to have made up a larger share of the early voting totals compared to November, according to data compiled by georgiavotes.com and by the U.S. Elections Project. As of Tuesday morning, 31 percent of early votes had been cast by Black voters, according to available data — up from roughly 28 percent in November.
Among the tens of thousands of Georgians who did not participate in the general election but have registered to vote since then, Black voters made up an outsize share, according to TargetSmart data published last week.
All told, the number of early ballots cast by Black voters has reached 85 percent of the total early votes cast by Black voters in the general election, compared to just 75 percent among white voters, who tend to vote Republican.
Local authorities in Washington are cautioning residents to avoid potentially violent agitators expected to gather downtown on Tuesday and Wednesday to amplify President Trump’s false claims of voter fraud in the November election.
The chief of the Metropolitan Police Department, Robert J. Contee III, said the police received information that people intend to show up to the demonstrations armed, a violation of local firearm laws.
Mr. Trump is expected to appear at the rally on Wednesday and has encouraged his supporters to travel to Washington for the event. Some of his allies, including the conspiracy theorist and conservative radio host Alex Jones and some associates who recently received a pardon from the president, were expected to speak to crowds of Trump supporters and armed groups on Tuesday afternoon, one day before Congress begins the formal counting of the Electoral College votes.
A spokeswoman for the Eighty Percent Coalition, which was publicizing the event on Tuesday, did not return requests for comment.
On Monday the leader of the Proud Boys, a far-right group that has supported President Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results, was arrested on charges of destruction of property stemming from an episode in downtown Washington last month. Upon his arrest, he was found to have two high-capacity firearm magazines and was charged accordingly with possession.
“Protest organizations and the groups they represent have shown an alarming affinity for violence. Sadly, they have not been shy about suggesting the need for violence,” Marc Elrich, the executive of neighboring Montgomery County, Md., said in a statement warning local residents to avoid potential clashes between supporters of Mr. Trump and counterprotesters. “There is talk of disrupting the counting of votes in Congress, which would require extreme actions.”
Mayor Muriel Bowser of Washington on Monday requested support from the Army National Guard for the rallies. About 340 National Guard troops are expected to be present for the rallies and Customs and Border Protection has also placed tactical teams on standby to help protect federal property.
“We will not allow people to incite violence, intimidate our residents or cause destruction in our city,” Ms. Bowser said during a news conference on Monday. “We’re asking D.C. residents and people who live in the region to avoid confrontations with anybody who’s looking for a fight.”
There were a number of violent clashes last month between supporters of Mr. Trump and counterprotesters in the nation’s capital, where four people were stabbed.
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