Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee said she and her allies plan to challenge the validity of electoral votes in multiple states. | Getty House Democrats to challenge Trump's Electoral College win As many as 10 members plan to mount objections when Congress meets Friday, but so far no senator has joined them.

A Democratic congresswoman from Texas confirmed late Thursday that she and as many as 10 colleagues will contest the validity of Donald Trump's election Friday, when lawmakers meet at the Capitol to certify Trump's Electoral College victory.

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee said in a phone interview that she and her allies plan to challenge the validity of electoral votes in multiple states, where she argued voter suppression tactics may have tainted the outcome. She said a separate batch of challenges will focus on disqualifying electors who may have been ineligible to serve at all.


"This is an American question of justice and fairness and the appropriate running of presidential elections," Jackson Lee said.

Though the Constitution empowers the Electoral College to choose the president, it requires Congress to review the votes and reject any it deems invalid.

It's also why the Democratic members' gambit is effectively a dead-end: Congress is controlled by Republicans who have little interest in standing in the way of the president-elect's ascension to the White House.

The maneuver to impede Trump's election also faces another potentially crippling problem: challenges to electoral votes require the support of at least one member of both House and the Senate. So far, Jackson Lee said, no senators have stepped forward to join the effort.

"I certainly think the difficulty will be if we do not secure a senator," she said, adding that she's hopeful that the House members' case will be compelling enough to convince at least one Democratic senator to step forward.

It's reminiscent of an attempted challenge by Democrats to George W. Bush's victory in 2000, when House members lodged objections to Florida's decisive electoral votes but couldn't convince any senators to join them. In 2005, Ohio Rep. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones secured support from California Sen. Barbara Boxer to challenge Ohio's electoral votes, forcing a two-hour debate but ultimately failing to win support.

If House members did manage to secure support from a senator this time, it could delay by hours the certification of Trump's election. In such cases, federal law requires the branches to meet separately and debate the merits of any challenge before reconvening to make a determination.

Jackson Lee said House Democratic leaders have not attempted to dissuade any challenges. Though voter suppression will be the core of the objections, she also pointed to research released Thursday by a group of independent lawyers who argued that as many as 50 of Republican electors were ineligible to serve. Many, they noted, are state legislators and office-holders in states that prohibit people from holding two public offices at the same time. Others, they argued, violated residency requirements.

"My goal is to ensure that the principles upon which this nation was built, the whole concept of democracy -- one person one vote -- is followed no matter what party prevails," Jackson Lee said. "If electors are being seated that did not meet the criteria, they should not be seated. That's a failure of the system."

Jackson Lee did not identify other members she expects to join her, but POLITICO identified four who were considering challenges of their own: Ed Perlmutter of Colorado, Bobby Scott of Virginia, John Conyers of Michigan and Jamie Raskin of Maryland.

The House and Senate are slated to convene in a joint session at 1 p.m. to count electoral votes. Under the system spelled out in state law, states are called alphabetically, and their electoral votes are recorded unless a challenge is lodged.