Donald Trump's new running mate, Sen. JD Vance, wasn't yet a member of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, when an angry mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, chanting "hang Mike Pence" and seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
But that hasn't stopped Vance, R-Ohio, from promoting Trump's unfounded claims about that election, won by President Joe Biden, and insisting lawmakers could have fought the results.
“If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there,” Vance said in an interview with ABC News this year. “That is the legitimate way to deal with an election that a lot of folks, including me, think had a lot of problems in 2020. I think that’s what we should have done.”
Rick Hasen, an election law expert and professor at the UCLA School of Law, said it's the states that are empowered to contest their results and proffer slates of electors — not the vice president.
"There were single slates of electors that were submitted from each state, and there was no reasonable basis to challenge the legitimacy of those slates of electors," he said.
In interviews, Vance has repeatedly argued there were problems with the 2020 election, pointing to pandemic-related election rule changes like mail voting expansions, which Republicans protested and didn't seek to rally their voters around, and a social media company’s decision to block a story about Hunter Biden, the president's son, weeks ahead of the election.
“Whether you think Hunter Biden is as major an issue as I do or disagree, in American democracy you let the voters decide. That was a way in which the basic democratic will of America was obstructed. I don’t see any reason to think that Dominion voting machines switched ballots, but there was a breakdown in democratic will,” Vance recently told The New York Times.
In the same interview, Vance also defended his questioning of the 2020 results.
“I think that challenging elections and questioning the legitimacy of elections is actually part of the democratic process. When Trump says the election was stolen and people say he was wrong, I say, 'Fine, we can argue about that.' When they say, 'He’s threatening the foundation of American society,' I can’t help but roll my eyes," he said.
Vance began advancing false claims about the 2020 race before he was elected to the Senate in 2022.
“There were certainly people voting illegally on a large-scale basis,” Vance said in a 2021 interview with The Vindicator newspaper of Youngstown.
There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud, despite countless audits, investigations and examinations of the 2020 election. The Trump campaign and its allies filed dozens of lawsuits to try to affect the results, but they were unsuccessful in large part because they had no evidence.
Vance also falsely claimed that Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg spent $420 million “buying up local boards of elections in battleground states of mostly Democratic areas” to “tilt” the vote in Biden’s favor.
In reality, Zuckerberg donated to two groups that funneled money to election officials to accommodate pandemic-related changes to the elections. Election officials used the grants allocated by nonprofit groups to buy masks and pens for poll workers, among other things.
Whether or not the Trump-Vance ticket wins in November, Vance will be asked to vote to certify the election results in his role as a senator.
“Sure, if it’s a free and fair election, I will accept the results standard, whoever wins," Vance said on CNN in May.
