What happens if proof emerges election was stolen?

FPI / June 23, 2021

Mike Lindell has said that he has evidence of fraud that will force the Supreme Court to unanimously overturn the Nov. 3 election and put Donald J Trump back in the White House.

So, what would happen if a U.S. presidential election was proven to be stolen?

"What would be the recourse? Or would the nation just have to accept its illegitimate ruler the way they do in corrupt Third World countries?" Frank Miele wrote in a June 21 op-ed for RealClearPolitics.

"Mind you," Miele noted, "this is hypothetical only, so Facebook and Twitter and any other Big Tech tyrants have no reason to censor or suppress this line of inquiry. It is what educators used to encourage in their students — critical thinking, looking at an issue from all sides and without preconditions in order to form a judgment. But critical thinking is in short supply in 21st century America."

Trump said on Monday that he has not conceded the 2020 presidential race. He added that if Mike Pence had sent disputed election results back to state legislatures for review the country "might very well have a different president right now."

"No, I never admitted defeat," Trump told Just the News's "Water Cooler" in an exclusive interview on Real America's Voice.

"We have a lot of things happening right now ... all you have to do is read the newspapers and see what's coming out now," he said, adding that he has "not conceded."

Trump told the "The Water Cooler" host David Brody that if the election was tainted by fraud any decision on reinstating him as president would fall to the public or possibly to politicians.

"If the election was fraudulent, people are gonna have to make up their own minds," he said. "It's not gonna be up to me. It's gonna be up to the public. It's gonna be up to, perhaps, politicians. I don't think there's ever been a case like this where hundreds of thousands of votes will be found. So we'll have to see what happens."

Trump said that he is "disappointed" that Pence did not kick some states' electoral vote counts back to their state legislatures for review, speculating that if Pence had done so there may have been a different president in office today.

"Well, I've always liked Mike, and I'm very disappointed that he didn't send it back to the legislatures," he said. "When you have more votes than you have voters in some cases and when you have the kind of things that are, that were known — in many cases they were known then, but they're certainly getting better and better known now — I was disappointed that he didn't send it back. I felt he had the right to send it back, and he should've sent it back. That's my opinion. I think you would have found that you might very well have a different president right now had he sent 'em back."

There are cases where election results have been overturned in state courts after fraud was proven.

"Most notably," Miele noted, was the case in 1998 where incumbent Miami Mayor Joe Carollo lost in a runoff election. But it was proven that hundreds of absentee ballots were fraudulent, and a court of appeals reversed the election and reinstated Carollo as mayor.

"That’s what Lindell — and maybe Trump — is hoping will happen in August, but the main factor weighing against such an outcome is the U.S. Constitution, which is silent on voter fraud but lays out pretty strict guidelines for how and when a president may be removed from office," Miele wrote.

Hypothetically, Miele continued, if it became obvious that the sitting president was not duly elected because evidence surfaced showing a foreign power tampered with the election in order to oust Trump, what does the Supreme Court do?

"Could the court rely on a process argument to avoid making a ruling? Would the court fall back on 'lack of standing' or 'moot' or 'too late'? Remember, the hypothesis is that a foreign power interfered in a U.S. presidential election. Does anyone really think that our high court justices would turn their heads and ignore evidence that Joe Biden was elected not by the American people but by the Chinese Communist Party? I don’t. So in that extreme case, the court would have to do something that courts don’t like to do — make it up as it goes along."

Miele continued: "If the court were convinced that the president had won his office as a result of fraud, and especially a foreign conspiracy, could it merely wait for the political process of impeachment to take care of the problem? That seems unlikely to me, especially in the hyper-partisan environment we live in today. Democrats in Congress would likely rally around their tainted president rather than sacrifice their progressive agenda. The vice president would herself be subject to the same questions of illegitimacy as the president, so would not be considered fit to serve either.

"It would therefore be up to the Supreme Court justices to solve the problem, rather than ignore it, as much as they would wish to. My guess is that they would hew as closely to the declared intent of the Constitution as possible, and to existing case law. In my mind, that means they would honor the mandated order of succession for the presidency: If both Biden and Harris were removed from office, the presidency would fall not to Donald Trump, but to Nancy Pelosi, who as speaker of the House is second in line to the presidency. Trump may have been cheated out of the office, but the Constitution provides no remedy for that, short of the Electoral College or Congress rejecting fraudulent results prior to the inauguration, a remedy that is indeed 'moot' and 'too late' in the present instance."

If Pelosi did ascend to the presidency, it would be in an "acting" role only, according to the Presidential Succession Act.

"That would in essence turn the 2022 election into a parliamentary election to determine the next president," Miele noted. "If the Democrats won the House in 2022, Pelosi could finish her term as president, but if Republicans won, the new GOP speaker would presumably be sworn in as the new acting president."

That scenario, "raises the fascinating possibility of Republicans running for the House in the 2022 election on the pledge that if the GOP retakes the chamber, the party will name Donald Trump as speaker. That could happen even if Trump doesn’t run for a House seat himself since there is no constitutional requirement that the speaker be a member of the House."

Miele added: "So maybe Trump won’t be president in August of 2021, but he well could be in January of 2023."

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