rasmussen

Most Read

Top stories

Pro-Trump Pollster Quotes Stalin In Bizarre Twitter Thread Claiming Pence Can Refuse to Count All Electoral Votes
Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

Every state in the union has certified its election results and each state's electors have cast their electoral ballots for the 2020 election, with President-elect Joe Biden securing 306 electoral votes—well over the 270 required to take the White House.

Nevertheless, conservative outlets continue to peddle outgoing President Donald Trump's delusional claims that widespread election fraud coordinated by Democrats somehow delivered a false victory to Biden.

Trump's frivolous lawsuits, bizarre state legislature hearings, and countless lies on Twitter have brought him no closer to the presidency, but they have succeeded in undermining faith in the electoral process among a significant number of Americans.

Next week, Vice President Mike Pence will oversee a joint session of the Senate and House of Representatives where he'll read the electoral votes aloud for Congress to officially acknowledge.

Trump's allies are under the collective delusion that this somehow gives Pence the power to determine the results.

The far-right Rasmussen polling group amplified this Republican fantasy, and they quoted Soviet Union ruler Joseph Stalin to do so.




Ohio State University law professor Edward Foley responded to Rasmussen's assertion in an email to The Hill, saying:

"The Vice President is not supposed to control the outcome of the process for counting the electoral votes from the states. That's true from the perspective of the Constitution as well as the Electoral Count Act ... The Vice President chairs the joint session, but does not decide what electoral votes to count."

Foley added that the framers of the Constitution knew future Vice Presidents would likely be on presidential tickets, and accounted for this by safeguarding the results from their influence.

Rasmussen's argument was widely mocked, especially for its invocation of Stalin.






The ill-advised tweet did nothing for the pollster's reputation.



President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will be inaugurated on January 20th.