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electoral college
'The Big Lie Is Back' as Trump's GOP Reboots Felony-Facing Fake Electors
"The election deniers are back at it, laying the groundwork to run the Big Lie playbook once again," warned one swing-state campaigner.
Nov 04, 2024
At least 1 in 5 potential battleground state electors for former U.S. President Donald Trump are linked to the Republican nominee's attempt to subvert the 2020 election, according to an analysis published Monday.
Politico reported that "of the 93 Republicans designated as prospective presidential electors for Trump from the seven battleground states, eight are facing felony charges for signing false Electoral College certificates in 2020."
Five additional possible electors signed similar documents in 2020 but were not criminally charged, according to the reporting, while at least half a dozen others "played notable roles in challenging the results of the 2020 election or promoting election conspiracy theories."
"These people continued to peddle and push not misinformation, which is accidental, but disinformation, which is intentional."
With numerous Trump aides and GOP officials facing criminal charges for their alleged roles in the former president's bogus "Stop the Steal" scheme, experts say it is somewhat less likely that the Republican nominee or his allies would attempt another such plot. However, Trump and his boosters have recycled similar claims of election fraud in what critics say is a bid to spread misinformation and sow doubt about the outcome of Tuesday's contest if the 2020 loser is defeated by Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.
"It does show a lack of regard for the criminal and ethical problems with doing this," Mary McCord, a Georgetown law professor and executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, told Politico.
As Politico notes:
Six of the returning fake electors hail from Michigan. John Haggard, Hank Choate, Timothy King, Meshawn Maddock, Amy Facchinello, and Marian Sheridan were among the group of Michiganders who signed a document in 2020 purporting to be official electoral certificates claiming the state’s electoral votes went to Donald Trump, despite Biden winning Michigan by more than 150,000 votes. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, brought felony charges against them, including forgery-related crimes punishable by up to 14 years. Those cases are ongoing and all have pleaded not guilty.
In the battleground state of Wisconsin—where President Joe Biden defeated Trump by less than 21,000 votes, or 0.63%, in 2020—"election deniers are back at it, laying the groundwork to run the Big Lie playbook once again through actions designed to attack the electoral process, sow seeds of chaos set to bloom post-election, and further undermine confidence in our democracy," warned Wisconsin Democracy Campaign executive director Nick Ramos in a Sunday opinion piece in the Cap Times.
"That is exactly what their antics wrought after the 2020 election—chaos resulting in the January 6 insurrection and years of baseless conspiracy theories that did not, and will not, succeed in changing a single election result but did succeed in undermining the confidence of millions of Americans in our democracy," he continued.
"The bullies are back again, continuing their strategy to interfere in Wisconsin's elections," Ramos added.
While some observers claim that would-be election subversives are likely to tread gingerly in light of the potential criminal consequences for alleged Big Lie conspirators, McCord said that "it would appear that the party leadership in the states where there are fraudulent electors serving as electors again are not taking seriously things like the criminal charges that have been brought against these fraudulent electors."
Amy Tarkanian, a former chair of the Nevada Republican Party, told Politico that "these people continued to peddle and push not misinformation, which is accidental, but disinformation, which is intentional."
"It's definitely disappointing," she lamented.
In Arizona—where former state GOP chief Kelli Ward and 11 other Republican officials have been criminally charged in connection with the alleged fake electors scheme—current Republican Party Chair Gina Swoboda has been pushing spurious election fraud claims. This, even as Loraine Pellegrino, a past president of a right-wing women's group who falsely attested that Trump won Arizona in 2020, earlier this year became the first person convicted in the state's fake electors case.
Democracy defenders have sounded the alarm on the potential for violence fueled by baseless claims of election fraud.
The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism said last week that it is "seeing the same warning signs of political violence based on election denialism combined with violent language across fringe platforms that we saw in the weeks before the 2020 election and before the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol."
According to a YouGov poll published Saturday, just over two-thirds of respondents—including more than 80% of surveyed Democrats and 55% of Republicans— believe it is either "somewhat" or "very likely" that Trump will refuse to concede if he loses to Harris.
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Yes, Trump and the GOP Have a Plan to Steal This Election If Defeated
The pieces are already being put into place, which is giving me a terrible sense of déjà vu.
Oct 15, 2024
Sometimes I hate being right.
Donald Trump is campaigning in Blue states right now, including California, Colorado, and New York. It has pundits scratching their heads: is it just all about his ego? Is he crazy? Or crazy like a fox?
I’d argue the latter: that this is part of a strategy to legally seize the White House after he’s lost both the popular vote and the Electoral College vote, much like Republican Rutherford B. Hayes did in the election of 1876.
Eight months before the 2020 election, I wrote a largely-ridiculed article for Alternet.org predicting that Trump would lose the election but would then use multiple phony slates of swing-state electors to try to get the Electoral College count thrown to the House of Representatives where, under the 12th Amendment, the Republican majority would crown him president.
I noted that I’d first heard of the plan that month from a Republican insider I knew from my days living and doing my radio/TV program from Washington, DC.
And, as we all now know, that’s pretty much exactly what happened.
Fortunately, Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi stopped Trump and his merry band of corrupt lawyers and lawmakers (including Mike Johnson, who led the effort in the House) from executing the plan, but not before five civilians and three police officers lay dead because Trump incited a violent attack on the Capitol in his final, desperate attempt to pull it off.
Now we know, I believe, why Donald Trump thinks it’s so important to call out the military around election day this year. He expects millions of Americans to be in the streets because his plan is for the House, Republicans in the states, and the Supreme Court to hand him the presidency regardless of the election’s outcome.
Last Friday, my SiriusXM colleague Michelangelo Signorile mentioned to me (on his program) that a prominent rightwing hate radio host had claimed Trump is campaigning in Blue states right now so he can help out down-ballot House members in those states. According to that host, it’s all about holding the House so when the time comes for the election to be certified Republicans will be able to deny that still-necessary certification and vote Trump in themselves.
Which is giving me a terrible sense of déjà vu. At the risk of again playing the reluctant role of Cassandra, here are some examples of how Trump and the GOP could try to steal the White House this winter, regardless of how the vote turns out. And how Republicans are today telegraphing this very outcome.
Article II (the Executive Branch), Section I, Clause 2 of the Constitution (and the 12th Amendment, which revises it) gives solely to the legislatures of the states the power to control the electors who will decide the presidential election.
It does not say — and there is no federal law that says — that the people of the states shall vote for their choice of president and then that vote shall be reflected in the states’ electoral votes. It’s entirely up to each state’s legislature (without any input from the governor).
“Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors…” is how it appears in Article II of the Constitution.
As Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote in the 2000 Bush v Goredecision when the US Supreme Court overturned the Florida Supreme Court’s order for a recount that would have given the election to Al Gore:
“The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States… [T]he state legislature’s power to select the manner for appointing electors is plenary; it may, if it so chooses, select the electors itself, which indeed was the manner used by state legislatures in several States for many years after the framing of our Constitution.”
Every state’s legislature generally directs all their electors to vote for the candidate who won the majority in the state (Maine and Nebraska are the exception, allowing for split decisions), a system we call “winner takes all,” but, as Rehnquist noted, a state’s legislature (its combined house or assembly and senate) can, by simple majority vote, direct its electors to vote for any candidate they want, even over the objection of their governor.
In the 2000 election, for example, when the Florida Supreme Court ordered a complete recount of the vote for president in that state, Jeb Bush and his Republicans knew that a full, statewide recount would give Al Gore the presidency. (It would have discovered the additional 45,599 votes for Al Gore that Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris arbitrarily and illegally chose not to count, as The New York Times noted a year later.)
In other words, had the U.S. Supreme Court not intervened to stop the Florida recount, the Republicans in the Florida legislature were fully prepared to hand the entire Florida electoral college vote — and, thus, the White House — to George W. Bush, even if a recount showed that Al Gore actually won the state. It was, after all, their constitutional right, as Rehnquist later noted in Bush v Gore.
As David Barstow and Somini Sengupta wrote for the New York Times on November 28, 2000, just before the Supreme Court intervened:
“The president of Florida’s Senate said today that Gov. Jeb Bush had indicated his willingness to sign special legislation intended to award Florida’s 25 Electoral College votes to his brother Gov. George W. Bush of Texas even as the election results were being contested.”
“But,” some say, “Kamala Harris is the Vice President, so she won’t refuse to accept the Electoral College votes like Trump wanted Pence to do!”
That’s true, but irrelevant.
While the updated Electoral Count Act explicitly redefines the Vice President’s role as purely ceremonial, it does not — and could not without a constitutional amendment —alter the power of individual Republican-controlled swing states to send Trump electors (claiming that the Harris-winning results in their states are the result of voter fraud) to DC.
Regardless of how transparently dishonest such an effort would be, its primary result would be to throw to the Supreme Court the decision over which electors to count.
Multiple Court observers have noted how light the Court’s docket is this fall because, they speculate, Roberts is fully expecting to play a role in the election similar to what five Republicans on the Court did in 2000 when they stopped the Florida recount, handing the White House to George W. Bush.
The Court could then declare the election flawed because of the alleged voter fraud — Republicans across the country, as well as Trump and Vance, are already preparing the ground for this claim — and, citing the 12th Amendment, throw it to the House of Representatives.
Under that scenario, each state’s House delegation has one single vote for president (the Senate is not involved under the 12th Amendment) and right now there are 26 states controlled by Republicans: the 26-24 vote would put Trump and Vance in the White House for the next four years.
That strategy would require one or more individual states to either refuse to certify their vote, delay certifying their vote, or submit multiple slates of electors.
And we’re already hearing from both local elections officials and state legislators’ rumblings that this is exactly what they intend to do.
Another option to produce the same result would be for a majority vote in the House to refuse to certify a Harris win.
Which brings us back to Trump campaigning in Blue states. As Ed Kilgore wrote for The New Yorker:
“As it happens, there are ten highly competitive House races in California and New York, and a Trump appearance nearby could goose GOP turnout and promote party-organizing efforts in ways that could make a difference in those contests.”
This brings us back to the scenario Michelangelo shared with me. The new, 2025-2026 House is sworn in on January 3rd, whereas the presidential vote is certified on January 6th.
If Democrats win the House in November and are sworn in on January 3rd, it’s unlikely that Speaker Hakeem Jeffries would go along with Trump’s scheme on January 6th, and Republicans wouldn’t have the necessary majority in any case.
But if Republicans can hold the House, there’s a good chance that Speaker Mike Johnson would happily hold the vote to declare Harris’ win as “fraudulent.” After all, he’s the guy who corralled fully 147 votes against certifying the 2020 election in the House; his being the ringleader of that effort is the main reason he’s the speaker right now.
There are multiple razor-tight House races in California, Colorado, and New York. Trump and his co-conspirators may well believe that his holding rallies in those states represents the best bet for helping Republicans win those races, thus insuring Johnson is in charge of the House so they can refuse certification and throw the case to themselves via the Supreme Court.
Seizing control of the Senate would be the icing on the cake for this scheme, as it’s also sworn in on January 3rd and also votes to certify the Electoral College vote, but a deadlock is only necessary in one of the two legislative bodies, and if the 12th Amendment is invoked by six Republicans on the Supreme Court because of that deadlock only the House votes for president.
Keep in mind, JD Vance is still refusing to say that Trump lost the 2020 election, most recently stonewalling the question five timesin a podcast interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro of The New York Times last week. Donald Trump is also still asserting that he won, and is already signaling that he intends to declare victory in November regardless of the “official” outcome.
And, unlike in 2020, there are no longer Mitt Romneys, Adam Kinzingers, or Liz Cheneys in Congress who could gum up the works. The GOP is today unified in its assertion that voter fraud handed Joe Biden the 2020 presidency: this is the perfect setup for the scenarios I’m describing, and Republicans know it. They created it, in fact.
The most likely scenario, though, would involve local election officials gumming up the works by slow-walking counts, challenging counts, or outright refusing to certify counts at the state level long enough that several individual state votes can’t be certified by January 6th, very much like in the election of 1876.
That would provide an easy excuse for the six Republicans on the Supreme Court to intervene, invoke the 12th Amendment, and throwing the election to the House, guaranteeing Trump’s victory.
As Jim Rutenberg and Nick Corasaniti recently wrote for The New York Times:
“The Republican Party and its conservative allies are engaged in an unprecedented legal campaign targeting the American voting system. Their wide-ranging and methodical effort is laying the groundwork to contest an election that they argue, falsely, is already being rigged against former President Donald J. Trump. …
“Even if the cases fail, Mr. Trump’s allies are building excuses to dispute the results, while trying to empower thousands of local election officials to disrupt the process. Already, election board members in several states have moved to block certification of primary election tallies, including in a major swing county in Nevada last week.”
The updated Electoral Count Act sets a hard date of December 11th for states to certify the vote, but doesn’t detail any consequences or outcomes if states fail to meet that date. Thus, in the case of conflict, confusion, or multiple lawsuits the case would, again, end up before the six Republicans who control the Supreme Court.
As the Times’ Rutenberg and Corasaniti note:
“For his part, Mr. Whatley, the co-chair of the Republican National Committee, was noncommittal when reporters recently asked him if his party would seek to block certification in any states this fall.
“‘We’re not going to cross any of those bridges right now,’ he said.”
Gee, ya think? They couldn’t be telegraphing their plans any more clearly if they were skywriting them.
I wrapped up my March 2020 article predicting the GOP’s upcoming fake elector strategy by imploring Democrats and the media to ring the alarm before they tried to pull it off:
“Get it into the media and repeat it over and over again: The GOP plans to claim Democratic voter fraud in this election to steal the election for themselves, and they’re already getting people primed for it!”
It’s worth repeating today.
Pass it along.
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Election 2024 Could Stir Up Another Witch’s Brew of Frights for US Democracy
Demented Donald would turn America into His Own Special Hell (HOSH, not MAGA). Harris would not lead us to heaven, but she’d take us to a better place and spare us from any of Trump’s shenanigans.
Oct 15, 2024
Eight years ago, Hillary R. Clinton seemed certain to derail Donald J. Trump’s barely begun political career. Instead, a witch’s brew of misogyny, mistakes, and the Electoral College gave us our second minority-vote president of the early 21st century.
Eight years later, here we are in the final weeks of a second presidential matchup with an equally possible stark and dark outcome, Trump versus Kamala Harris.
Demented Donald would turn America into His Own Special Hell (HOSH, not MAGA). Harris would not lead us to heaven, but she’d take us to a better place and spare us from any of Trump’s shenanigans. If she wins, she’d also finally add the United States to the list of nations together enough to elect a woman to the highest office in the land.
America’s Founding Fathers left us so much to be proud of. The Electoral College, on the other hand, is nothing to be proud of.
Now let’s examine some aspects of Election 2024, starting with the one that tops all the others: the almost laughable axiom that character counts in the race to the White House. This year, in the large, character counts for approximately zero.
The Republican candidate is a convicted felon, a sexual predator, a serial liar, a grifter, a racist, a poster boy for moral bankruptcy (and financial bankruptcy as well). None of which matters: Unfathomably, unbelievably, tens of millions of Americans will vote to put him back in the Oval Office for another four years.
Underlining the point—the irrelevance of character in Election 2024—the best comes last. A 449-page book by Vincent L. Sterling, published this June, argues (seriously) that Donald J. Trump has been chosen by God. Of course, of course; how could any character-conscious voter miss the divine clues that Sterling spies?
The Democrats pulled off a surprise by nominating little-known Tim Walz for vice president, and he returned the favor with a surprise of his own. The headline of one news report summed it up: “Tim Walz’s simple takedown of Republicans goes viral.”
Walz’s plain words, stingingly sharply, gave the Harris-Walz ticket an exhilarating liftoff: “These guys are creepy and yes, just weird as hell.”
When was the last time that major members of a political party openly opposed their chosen presidential nominee? Good for you for remembering it was only four years ago, and the candidate they couldn’t and wouldn’t vote for was Donald Trump. Among the non-Trumpers were marquee names by the scores, headed by former president George W. Bush. The nays also included three former secretaries of defense (William H. Cohen, Chuck Hagel and James Mattis) and Colin Powell, the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff who went on serve as Bush’s secretary of state.
The number of Republicans repelled by Trump is only half the story in 2024, and it’s the other half that’s rocked and shocked both parties. In addition to opposing The Donald, droves of GOPers have also publicly declared they’ll be voting for Harris. Once again there’s a glittering roster of Republican turncoats, topped off this time by one of the most committed right-wingers ever to occupy the ranks of the right. That would be former Vice President Dick Cheney, who finally showed just a touch of the spine of his daughter Liz.
Cheney not only matched his daughter, he outmatched the man he served as vice president. Former President George W. Bush has no plans to endorse anybody in 2024. According to his office, “President Bush retired from presidential politics years ago.” (Note: Bush the retiree personally revealed that his vote in 2020 went not to Trump but to Condoleeza Rice.)
National security officials normally keep their presidential politics to themselves; not so, though, in the abnormal year of 2024.
Hundreds of high-ranking security personnel have not only thrown their support behind Harris, they’ve described Trump as “impulsive and ill-informed.” They see him as lacking in leadership and subject to a “scary authoritarian streak.” There were 741 signers to the letter that lays out their views, including U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Michael Smith, the president of National Security Leaders for America.
Come November 5, none of these ingredients will decide Election 2024; that power lies solely with the Electoral College.
America’s Founding Fathers left us so much to be proud of. The Electoral College, on the other hand, is nothing to be proud of. It’s been with us for our entire history, ever since the country was formed in Philadelphia in 1787. It was a compromise, inserted into the Constitution essentially to appease slaveholders in the colonial South.
Constitutional law expert Wilfred U. Codrington III describes it as a lasting stain: “More than two centuries after it was designed to empower southern white voters, the system continues to do just that.”
Stay tuned for November 5 (or the next day, or the next…)
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