U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski says she will vote in the affirmative on the Electoral College’s vote, and in favor of certifying the 2020 presidential election.

Her statement came shortly after Sen. Ted Cruz, who is leading a group of senators in challenging the validity of the election, issued a powerful statement calling for an audit.

The senators, which include Ron Johnson, R-Wis.; James Lankford, R-Okla.; Steve Daines, R-Mont.; John Kennedy, R-La.; Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and Mike Braun, R-Ind.; as well as Sens.-elect Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo.; Roger Marshall, R-Kansas; Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn., and Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., say there needs to be an emergency 10-day audit of the results by an electoral commission to investigate “unprecedented allegations of voter fraud and illegal conduct.”

The Sen. Cruz statement is at this link.

Cruz wrote, in part: “We are not naïve. We fully expect most if not all Democrats, and perhaps more than a few Republicans, to vote otherwise. But support of election integrity should not be a partisan issue. A fair and credible audit-conducted expeditiously and completed well before January 20-would dramatically improve Americans’ faith in our electoral process and would significantly enhance the legitimacy of whoever becomes our next President. We owe that to the People.

“These are matters worthy of the Congress, and entrusted to us to defend. We do not take this action lightly. We are acting not to thwart the democratic process, but rather to protect it. And every one of us should act together to ensure that the election was lawfully conducted under the Constitution and to do everything we can to restore faith in our Democracy.”

Murkowski is part of the moderate group of Republicans in the Senate and has shown her dictate for President Donald Trump frequently over the past four years.

Must Read Alaska was not able to reach the office of Sen. Dan Sullivan for comment. He is a friend of Sen. Cruz, who came to Alaska to campaign on his behalf this summer.

Murkowski’s statement said, in full: “I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States and that is what I will do January 6—just as I strive to do every day as I serve the people of Alaska. I will vote to affirm the 2020 presidential election. The courts and state legislatures have all honored their duty to hear legal allegations and have found nothing to warrant overturning the results. I urge my colleagues from both parties to recognize this and to join me in maintaining confidence in the Electoral College and our elections so that we ensure we have the continued trust of the American people.”

In a separate action,  Republican Sen. Josh Hawley said this week that he will object to a failure by Pennsylvania — to follow its own election laws.

The Constitution provides a process by which Congress confirms the vote of the Electoral College on Jan. 6 in a joint meeting of Congress. That is when the presidential election is finally over.

In a result that has been contested by many Republican observers, Joe Biden has 306 Electoral College votes, to 232 for President Trump, who has claimed that voter fraud was widespread in some of the battleground states. The candidates needed 270 Electoral College votes to win.

Cruz said on Fox News that an audit needs to be conducted in the states where results are being disputed. He cited as precedent the 1876 race between Samuel Tilden and Rutherford Hayes, when there were allegations of fraud in multiple states.

Read: Fraud of the Century, Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876, by Roy Morris.

“In 1877, Congress did not ignore those allegations, nor did the media simply dismiss those raising them as radicals trying to undermine democracy,” the Republicans lawmakers said in the statement. “Instead, Congress appointed an Electoral Commission — consisting of five Senators, five House Members, and five Supreme Court Justices — to consider and resolve the disputed returns,” Cruz said.

Sen. Mike Shower of Wasilla sent a letter to Alaska’s Acting Attorney General Ed Sniffen this week, requesting an investigation into election fraud in the November General Election in Alaska.

Shower says he has material to hand over to the Department of Law that should be of interest to the state, if not the federal law enforcement authorities.

Shower reached out to Alaskans on Facebook and asked them to provide him with concrete examples of fraud that they had witnessed. He said people sent him numerous anecdotes about receiving two or more ballots, and about people who voted in other states discovering that they had also voted in Alaska, and more.

Shower said he has gotten no response from the Division of Elections, and decided to elevate it, including notifying the Federal Bureau of Investigations with his findings.

Shower wrote that he was requesting a criminal investigation, and that he wants the Attorney General to seek assistance from the FBI to determine if federal crimes were committed with data breaches and mail fraud.

Shower was the author of 2019 legislation, Senate Bill 116, an “Election Integrity/Ballot Chain of Custody” proposal, addressing several concerns, including ending the practice of ballot destruction at the precinct level, establishing a secure chain of custody for all ballots, requiring the Division of Elections to notify voters when their votes were voided, and enacting new rules for cleaning up voter rolls. SB 116 would have also set up an elections fraud hotline to report suspicious activity.  The bill failed to get even one hearing under Senate President Cathy Giessel. The bill was referred to the State Affairs Committee, which Shower chaired at the time.

“Following the recent primary and general elections, my office fielded hundreds of complaints from across Alaska regarding ballot harvesting, voters receiving multiple absentee ballots they never requested, and people who were prevented from voting for their own legislator due to erroneous information at their polling locations,” Shower said. “Our work on SB116 also revealed that the Division of Elections policy, not state statute, permits the Director [of the division] to unilaterally determine which votes should count and which do not if double voting occurs.  I believe we must clarify DOE policy in statute rather than leaving it up to the discretion of a Director, which can change from administration to administration, to determine whose vote counts and whose will not.”  

Sen. Shower said he has been working with the Lieutenant Governor’s Office and the Division of Elections to address several outstanding concerns. 

“The situation is further exacerbated by the data breach which saw the personal information of over 113,000 Alaskans compromised,” he wrote. Shower is among those who received a letter from the Division of Elections saying their private information had been hacked by foreign operators.

“The data breach was not reported to the legislature, candidates, or the public until nearly a month after the election took place and after the election was certified. Since that time, some Alaskans have reported identity theft taking place which involves their personal information,” he said. Indeed, the announcement was not made by the Division of Elections until Dec. 3.

In a Georgia State Senate Judiciary Subcommittee meeting on Dec. 30, Committee Chairman Sen. William Ligon, heard testimony from experts and witnesses regarding the State of Georgia’s Election Integrity.  Throughout the hearing, the issues raised included reference to four states that experienced similar anomalies; Alaska was mentioned as one of them during the hearing, with a claim that Alaska experienced an 8 percent “overvote,” representing 43,000 more ballots cast than there are eligible voters in Alaska.

“In light of all the information being shared with our office and now on the record in other states which are experiencing similar election issues, it is imperative that we investigate these issues very closely.  What we have found on our own, with limited resources, has raised more questions than answers.  Our election system is too important to take any one of these issues lightly, much less all of them in one election cycle.  I look forward to continued work with the Lt. Governor and the Division of Elections on strengthening our Statewide elections system.  We must do everything in our power as elected officials to protect every Alaskan’s privacy and ensure the integrity of, and confidence in, our voting system,” Shower wrote.

Last February and March, medical authorities in government from the highest level in Washington, D.C. to local health directors told the public that the average person wearing a mask in public was engaging in an unhealthy behavior.

Mask wearing, they said, was ill-advised because masks are petri dishes for germs and viruses that people breathe into their lungs. Doctors and medical professionals change their masks frequently because of this petrie-dish scenario. The public, however, doesn’t have access to an endless supply of disposable masks, and therefore people are sucking in the bad stuff.

In Alaska, that authority was Dr. Anne Zink, the state’s Chief Health Officer, who told the Senate Health and Social Services Committee on Feb. 12, 2020 that a person wearing a mask is breathing in a wet, moist environment collecting viruses and bacteria, and it is in general not useful for protection from other persons’ germs.

Zink said that a mask was useful for someone walking into a clinic who was coughing or sneezing, but that the N95 mask — the one that is effective — has to be fitted and tested and that the recommendation was for average persons to not wear masks because they don’t know what they are doing with them.

Dr. Anthony Fauci said the same thing a month later, adding that wearing a mask might make people feel better, but isn’t providing protection. He said that people don’t wear them properly, and handle them recklessly. When asked about that statement by CBS News later in the summer, he equivocated.

“I don’t regret anything I said then because in the context of the time in which I said it, it was correct. We were told in our task force meetings that we have a serious problem with the lack of PPEs,” he said in an interview with CBS Evening News.

“In the context of the time,” is the key phrase.

To be clear, Fauci said it wasn’t good for Americans to wear masks because they did not work, only to later admit that he was really concerned about running out of masks for medical professionals. Fauci attended press White House coronavirus press briefings throughout March and April without wearing a mask. 

Fauci, a member of the White House coronavirus task force, will serve President-elect Joe Biden as his chief medical adviser after Inauguration Day on Jan. 20. 

It isn’t the first time Fauci has been caught misleading the public. Last week Fauci acknowledged that he selectively lied about the percentage of the population that must be vaccinated to halt the virus.

“When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” Fauci told the New York Times. “Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.”

Rather than following the science, Fauci seems to be following the surveys to gauge how willing Americans are to take his advice.

As for Alaska’s mask recommendations, an Alaska state advisory posted on April 3, 2020 recommended that people make their own cloth masks, and save the professional-grade masks for the medical professionals.

“Another tool that may help to minimize transmission while people are around others outside of their household is the use of face coverings,” the press release continued. “Because we are experiencing a nationwide shortage of medical supplies, including facemasks, we recommend that Alaskans make their own face coverings and wear them in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies) — especially in areas of significant community-based transmission.”

According to the State press release on April 3, there was sufficient evidence showing that asymptomatic and presymptomatic people can “shed” the virus to others. It was in sharp contrast to what Dr. Zink had stated just six weeks earlier.

“This means that people who have no symptoms whatsoever may be infected with the virus and capable of transmitting the virus to others when interacting in close proximity — for example, speaking, coughing, or sneezing,” the state’s press release noted. “This heightens the need for community-wide implementation of control measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 among people who are not experiencing symptoms of illness.”

Now, scientists are questioning just how true that statement is. In Nature, scientists say evidence shows that “about one in five infected people will experience no symptoms, and they will transmit the virus to significantly fewer people than someone with symptoms. But researchers are divided about whether asymptomatic infections are acting as a ‘silent driver’ of the pandemic.”

Sen. Marco Rubio earlier this week blasted Fauci for playing fast and loose with the facts.

Rubio wrote that Americans should cease “placing blind faith in unelected celebrity scientists — elevated by a media that award Emmys to negligent politicians with their own grisly records,” in reference to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s recent Emmy Award for hosting press conferences, despite his administration forcing COVID-19 patients into nursing homes, where they infected the residents, who then died from the virus.

“I do not question Dr. Fauci’s motives — I trust they are noble — but I am appalled by his arrogance,” Rubio wrote. “If he wants to lead the nation, he should run for office. Otherwise, he should give us an honest and transparent reading of the science, not polling data, and let the rest of us — policymakers and the American people who have elected them — do our jobs.”

Extra credit reading: “The surgical mask is a bad fit for risk reduction,” by Shane Neilson, MD