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With Donald Trump refusing to accept defeat nor concede and his lawmaker allies stepping up to object to the electoral vote count, there are also other Republicans who are speaking up against it. The latest to comment is Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson who gave the assurance of the inevitable outcome that Joe Biden is going to be the next president.
Hutchinson appeared on CBS’ Face the Nation over the weekend, where he shared his thoughts on the plans of his fellow GOP members to object to the electoral vote counts. Congress and the Senate will be meeting to formally count the votes cast by the Electoral College and outgoing vice president and Senate president Mike Pence will formally announce and affirm Biden’s victory. Biden received 306 electoral votes while Trump received 232 electoral votes. The states, especially Georgia, have already certified the results.
“It’s a process that they have the right to initiate. I think it certainly will fail,” said Hutchinson, who also noted that any challenges to the election results have already been heard. “Joe Biden is our president-elect and he will be confirmed that capacity.”
12 Republican Senators including Ron Johnson, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley, have announced their plans to object to the electoral college vote count alongside 140 GOP members of the House. Democratic leadership has since dismissed the plans to object and other Republicans including Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowski, and Paul Ryan have condemned the move. The objection comes as a push of Trump’s conspiracy theory that election or voter fraud was committed despite being largely unsuccessful in the courts.
Trump views the upcoming joint session today as his last-ditch effort to overturn the election results in his favor. However, it is already known that any objections would not have any bearing on the election results and only delay the affirmation by the two chambers. This has also presented a divide among the Republican party, and the scale of the upcoming contention to the electoral votes cast is the first since the Civil War where a big portion of a political party has planned to object. Trump’s victory from the 2016 elections was objected to by some Democrats in Congress but Biden, who was the outgoing vice president at the time, dismissed the objections to confirm Trump’s win.
