Trump Lawyer Jenna Ellis: Electoral College Determines President-Elect

President Donald Trump campaign senior legal adviser Jenna Ellis speaks to media while flanked by Trump lawyer and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (L) and attorney Sidney Powell, at a press conference at the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington on Nov. 19, 2020. Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times

President Donald Trump’s lawyer Jenna Ellis said that until the Electoral College votes, there is no president-elect.

In an interview with Fox Business, Ellis said certifications from states and media projects mean little because the Electoral College is the body that determines who the president is.

“Until the Electoral College actually votes on Dec. 14, we don’t have a president-elect,” Ellis told Fox Business, adding that Trump’s team is working on lawsuits in several states as well as lobbying state legislatures to affirm their Constitutional authority to select electors to the Electoral College.

Numerous news outlets have called the race for Democrat Joe Biden, while several battleground states have certified the results of the Nov. 3 election in recent days. On Monday, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey and Secretary of State Katie Hobbs certified their state’s results. The Epoch Times has not called the race for either candidate.

“In Pennsylvania, we have two pieces pending and primed for the Supreme Court,” Ellis said, per Newsmax. “Now we have another case in the 3rd Circuit ready to go to the Supreme Court. We have 10 days from that ruling to appeal it.”

But meanwhile, state legislatures are affirmed “under the Constitution with election integrity and the ability to select the manner of their electors to move forward,” Ellis said, adding that they are taking that strategy “very seriously.” Ellis argued that the Constitution allowed for state legislatures to pick electors as “a safeguard.”

“The reason for that is to make sure that people’s voice is heard and the correct outcome ultimately happens through the Electoral College,” she said. “President Trump is right. There was widespread fraud, in at least 6 states ... the state legislatures must take back their selection of delegates and move forward to choosing the delegates that are preferred by the people we know President Trump won in a landslide.”

Ellis, in a Twitter post, elaborated in saying that “state law delegation of election process and manner of selecting delegates does not supersede the U.S. Constitution,” noting that it provides legislatures with the authority under Article II, Section 1 of the document.

So far, Trump’s team has lobbied the GOP-majority Senates of Pennsylvania and Arizona.

On Monday, Republican state lawmakers in Pennsylvania introduced a resolution to dispute the 2020 election results.

“Officials in the Executive and Judicial Branches of the Commonwealth infringed upon the General Assembly’s authority under the Constitution of the United States by unlawfully changing the rules governing the November 3, 2020, election in the Commonwealth,” the resolution (pdf) stated.

Their resolution calls on the secretary of the commonwealth, Kathy Boockvar, to withdraw the “premature certification” of the presidential election and delay the certification of other races.

The text of the resolution added, “We believe this moment is pivotal and important enough that the General Assembly needs to take extraordinary measures to answer these extraordinary questions. We also believe our representative oversight duty as Pennsylvania’s legislative branch of government demands us to re-assume our constitutional authority and take immediate action.”