President Donald Trump plans on speaking at a rally in Washington on Jan. 6.
“BIG CROWDS!” the president wrote in a tweet.
Organizers expect up to 1.5 million people to attend the rallies. Doors open for the event at the Ellipse, a 52-acre park south of the White House, four hours before Trump is scheduled to speak.
The Save America Rally is presented by Women for America First. The group says it supports an “America First Agenda”
Amy Kremer, one of the organizers, said in a tweet on Tuesday that the event will be “the largest rally ever.”
Trump said the people converging on Washington “don’t want to see an election victory stolen by emboldened Radical Left Democrats,” adding, “Our Country has had enough, they won’t take it anymore!”
Trump and his team, along with some other Republicans, say the election results in key battleground states were unfairly certified for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. They point to allegations and evidence of election and voter fraud and argue the results should be decertified.
Biden and many Democrats, along with some Republicans, say the election is over and Biden won.
Congress is meeting in Washington, near the rally, on Wednesday to count Electoral College votes. Under the system, voters cast ballots for slates of electors, even though they actually tick boxes for presidential candidates. The party for the candidate that gets the most votes in a state has its electors cast a ballot for that candidate and sends it to Washington. The joint session is to count those ballots.
“It’s our duty to the people of Michigan and to the U.S. Constitution to send another slate of electors if the election is in controversy or dispute—and clearly it is," Meshawn Maddock, Michigan Republican at-large national elector, said in a statement last month.
Republicans’ efforts now center around two possible paths to victory during the joint session. One is to object to electoral votes from disputed states, which will trigger a debate and vote in each chamber. Because objections require a majority of the vote, they are not expected to be upheld. Democrats control the House of Representatives and Senate GOP leadership has criticized the planned challenges. Twenty-seven GOP senators have come out in opposition to the efforts.
The second path involves Vice President Mike Pence, who will be presiding over the session in his role as president of the Senate. Pence can reject electoral votes from states where fraud occurred, backers say. Pence has not indicated whether he agrees with that line of reasoning. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other critics say Pence has a narrower role.
Pelosi told colleagues in a letter on Tuesday that Biden’s victory “will be recognized” when Congress meets.
“Tomorrow is about guaranteeing trust in our democratic system. As members of Congress, we all have a responsibility to uphold the principle: the people are sovereign and that they hold the power to choose their leaders through the ballot box,” she added.
