As November approaches, and we Americans again participate in the democratic election of our leaders, this year especially we should make ourselves aware of the weaknesses in the U.S. system for presidential election, which is more and more steeped in controversy. For those who don’t follow American politics or haven’t given their old civics lessons much thought in a while, we use the Electoral College for the election of U.S. presidents. This “college” is not a place but a process in which political parties in every state select intermediaries, usually loyal party representatives, who in a later election process will be certain to cast their votes for the candidates nominated by their party. Then, in the general election, everyday citizen voters cast their ballots, but even though on the paper ballots they seem to be voting directly for candidates, really their vote is just for the slate of electors who have pledged to vote for the selected candidates. Is that confusing? Let me try to put it more simply. When we vote for President, our votes are basically only counted as a vote of party preference. Though the names of presidential electors usually don’t appear on the ballots, that’s who we’re actually voting for. So when a party’s chosen electors vote in the general election, they are actually voting for themselves to be their state’s electors. No, it still sounds confusing, and that’s probably because it is, and rather needlessly so, with layers upon layers of election processes preventing genuine direct democracy. Just as in presidential primaries the people may vote for a preferred candidate, but who a party nominates is really determined by party delegates, so too we vote for the ticket we support, but it is electors who really choose the winner. After the general election votes are tallied, the actual presidential election begins. Whichever party got the most votes for their ticket in a given state then has their slate of electors officially appointed by the governor, and those electors gather to cast their official electoral votes. It is those votes that are afterward counted by Congress to certify election results. This was the proceeding that Trump and his supporters attempted to prevent in their siege of the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. The electoral college system draws criticism for many reasons. Perhaps the most prominent is that it is seen as a tool of minority rule, since increasingly in 21st century elections, the electoral vote and the popular vote have been at odds, allowing for candidates to take office even when fewer Americans voted for them. Thus it is seen by many as a tool for the undermining of democracy, and because of it, Pew research has shown that most Americans would prefer a direct popular vote. Related points of criticism have to do with the apportionment of electors favoring low-population swing states. In fact, during the Constitutional Convention, Alexander Hamilton and others favored the direct election of presidents but were forced to compromise with smaller states and slave states, who feared having no voting power, by giving all states a minimum of three electors regardless of population and by counting slaves as three-fifths of a person when calculating population, despite their being barred from participating in elections. Other issues taken with the Electoral College system are that it operates in most states as first-past-the-post voting, the party who achieves not a majority but a plurality thereafter able cast all the state’s electoral votes. This in effect ensures our two-party system, preventing the success of third-party candidates. Instead of this winner-take-all system, some call for more proportional representation in the electoral college, while others call for its abolishment altogether, in favor of a direct election, as many Founding Fathers preferred. But the most pressing concern about the Electoral College this election year has got to be that it is a system clearly vulnerable to manipulation. And it has always been acknowledged to be flawed and subject to exploitation. This is chiefly because of the threat of so-called “faithless electors,” or electors chosen by their parties, whose slate is duly appointed by their governors, who thereafter vote against their party’s wishes and against the will of all who voted for their party’s ticket in the general election, thereby subverting democracy entirely. This has been a problem from the beginning. In the 1796, election, when the jobs of President and Vice President were determined separately according to the electoral vote, 18 faithless electors pledged to the John Adams ticket chose not to vote for his running mate as Vice-President, as a result making John Adams’s rival, Thomas Jefferson, his vice president. And in the election of 1800, one elector from New York named Anthony Lispenard demanded to be allowed to cast his vote secretly. With Thomas Jefferson and his running-mate Aaron Burr extremely close in electoral votes, he intended to pull a little coup and install Burr as President, and Jefferson as Vice President instead of the other way round. While faithless electors have been a continual problem in the Electoral College, especially as secret ballots became the rule in some states, it rarely affects the outcome of elections, and most states have by now made their electors accountable by making it convention for electors to vote orally and by passing laws that will void the votes of faithless electors and in some cases levy fines and penalties. However, with Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, a different flaw in the Electoral College is now in the spotlight, a separate threat to democracy that every voter should understand.

In this blog and podcast, I often try to give historical context and insight into modern events. Sometimes that means focusing on more recent history. For example, former president Donald Trump’s refusal to accept election results and to instead engage in baseless conspiracy mongering was well-established long before he ever achieved the highest office in the U.S. Back in 2012, when President Obama was reelected, he insisted on Twitter that the election was a “total sham” and therefore that the U.S. was “not a democracy.” Likewise, while running for office in 2016, on numerous occasions he claimed that the American election process was “rigged” against him and even, in a stunning and unprecedented incident during a debate, refused to pledge that he would accept the election results. In the face of backlash, he clarified that he wanted to “reserve my right to contest or file a legal challenge in the case of a questionable result.” And he made it clear that, in his view, the only unquestionable result was “if I win.” During his 2020 reelection campaign, he again repeatedly suggested that the system was “rigged,” and that its rigging would be the only explanation if he lost. Indeed, Trump’s bagman, Roger Stone, and his former Rasputin, Steve Bannon, were already spinning up their Stop the Steal campaign even before election day. The slogan had been used in 2016 as well and then mothballed after Election Day, since they certainly didn’t want to continue suggesting an election was stolen if their man won it. But in the days and weeks following election day 2020, as Trump refused to concede the clear results of the election, the Trump team’s earnest efforts to overturn the results of an election he lost took definite shape. He pressured his Justice Department to investigate baseless claims of widespread election fraud in order to legitimize them, but his own Attorney General, Bill Barr, who had previously been a yes-man, declared there was no evidence of it. He launched numerous lawsuits alleging fraud in various states, all of which were thrown out for lack of evidence. And then he turned to extra-legal efforts, as detailed in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s recent indictment. He pressured Republican elections officials in key swing states to “find” him additional votes, to fraudulently decertify official election results, and to forge phony certificates of ascertainment in order to appoint new slates of fake electors that had been selected because of their loyalty and willingness to cast their electoral vote for Trump even though he had not won their state. And these efforts were pursued with the hard deadline of January 6th in mind, for Trump and his inner circle believed the election was not over until the electoral votes were certified, regardless of who the citizens had voted into office. After all, the popular vote doesn’t count. Trump didn’t win a majority in 2016 and didn’t need it. In the end, he finally resorted to pressuring Republican lawmakers not to certify the electoral votes, suggesting they could throw it to a congressional vote just by asserting that Vice President Pence had the authority to reject election results just because. In the end, all these efforts failed to overturn the election results, but they succeeded in instilling a fundamental distrust in our democratic processes among many. And though the efforts failed then, that doesn’t mean that they were abandoned. There is reason to believe that Trump’s backers never stopped their steal, that they have continued preparations in the same vein, streamlining their apparatus for election-stealing as they look forward to a time when they may make further attempts to overturn lawful election results.

Apologists claim that their fake electors strategy was all perfectly legal. Their notion is that state legislatures and/or officials could simply supersede their will over that of the electorate when there is evidence of fraud, which remember, Trump’s own Justice Department and every court that considered it said there was none. In emails, the electoral votes cast by these new electors were even called “fake,” though afterward it was suggested that “’alternative’ votes is probably a better term than ‘fake’ votes.” The hope was not even so much that these fake votes would be counted, but rather that discord would be sown, and in the chaos and confusion among lawmakers trying to certify electoral votes on January 6th, the result would be that Congress would send the whole mess to the Supreme Court, which Trump has packed with partisans who would effectively install him again as President. In defense of the idea, a precedent was cited from the election of 1960. That year, there was a very close race between JFK and Richard Nixon, and there were rumors then as well of Democrats benefitting from voter fraud. This happened to be the first time that Hawaii, which had just recently achieved statehood, participated in a presidential election. Nixon was favored to win Hawaii at first, as the Republican party had long dominated the islands, but Democrats had gained ground recently, and early totals suggested a Kennedy upset. When the election was instead called for Nixon, it was discovered there had been tabulation errors, and a circuit court judge ordered an official recount. While this recount was being conducted, two slates of electors were put together, one by each party. The governor certified the Republican electors, since Nixon was the winner until such time as the recount proved otherwise. However, the Democratic slate of electors also gathered to cast their votes, and they too signed elector certificates that asserted a Kennedy victory, in the event that the recount reversed the election results. As it turned out, that is exactly what happened, and the governor decertified the Republican elector slate, certifying the Democratic electors instead. There are some huge differences between what happened in 1960 and what Trump tried to pull. First, the two Hawaiian electoral vote certificates were created because of an official recount, due to clear evidence of tabulation errors. In 2020, the fake elector certificates created by Trump supporters used the exact same language as was used in 1960, but omitted any mention of the result pending an ongoing recount. Without this legitimate reason for an alternate certificate, it was simply a fraudulent attempt to steal electoral votes. Also, Hawaii was one state, whereas in 2020, this was tried in seven states, never on the basis of clear tabulation errors and an official recount but rather on proven misinformation. In Hawaii, in 1960, there were not accusations of fraud. The claims of fraud in that election had to do with Illinois, where there was a recount. In Hawaii, it was a pretty straightforward case of trying to make sure they got it right, and when the recount changed the result, the governor promptly certified the new Democratic elector slate. Moreover, when the contradictory certificates were sent to Washington, the loser in the election, Nixon, who was at the time Vice President and therefore presided over the certification of the election results, dutifully accepted only the Democratic elector certificate, which was certified. And in fact, Nixon even made clear that the incident should not be viewed as a precedent for any similar irregularities with alternate elector slates in the future.

At what was hoped would be a victory celebration, Nixon offered a concession when the night went Kennedy’s way, but his was a conditional concession, holding out hope that his supporters’ disputes of the election results would alter them.

While Richard Nixon did perform the duties of his office that January, many of his Republican supporters had been encouraging him to reject the election results ever since Kennedy’s win in November. It had been a very close race. When presidential races are too close to call, I’ve heard people complain that it didn’t used to be this way, that we always knew who our new President was by the time the evening news aired. That is not true, though. In 1960, the results were not official until midday the next day, and even then, Nixon did not concede until three days after the election. Rumors had already begun to circulate before election day that Kennedy was benefiting from fraud. When Kennedy took Illinois, it was believed by some Republicans that Chicago’s corrupt mayor, Richard Daley, who dominated the city with his political machine, had stolen the state’s electoral votes for Kennedy. Academic studies of election irregularities in Chicago have since determined that while there may have been miscounting, there was no widespread fraud, Nixon would never have taken the state, and even if he had, Illinois alone would not have won him the race. But Nixon supporters had already started alleging far more massive fraud than just in Illinois. A journalist friend of Nixon’s wrote a series of articles that enflamed the rumors of Illinois fraud and suggested fraud in Texas as well, which drew further press attention to the rumors. Then the Republican party chairman pushed for recounts in 11 states. They even attempted lawsuits, but as in 2020, their suits were tossed out by federal judges or otherwise came to nothing. Nixon distanced himself from the Republican party’s efforts to dispute the election results, fearing he would look like a “sore loser,” and in later years he would claim that even President Eisenhower had urged him to contest the election but he had honorably refused, not wanting to “tear the country apart.” In reality, it appears to have been the opposite, with Ike withdrawing support for the dispute and Nixon pushing privately for a continued aggressive effort to challenge the results while publicly conceding defeat. Eisenhower may have represented the more moderate wing of the Republican Party in his refusal to have any part of these efforts, but even then the party was supported by those on the far right with more radical and even explicitly fascist tendencies.

Some of the major supporters of this effort to overturn the results of the 1960 election were hardline white supremacists. There was Willis Carto, whose Liberty Lobby had become more and more influential on American conservative politics, and who, in his organization’s publication, “The Liberty Letter,” read by many a moderate Republican, claimed the election had been rigged, that it had been stolen from Nixon, but that there was unequivocal proof of election fraud but that corrupt Democrats had suppressed it and the only thing that could stop Kennedy from stealing the presidency would be for those on the right to rise up before the electoral votes were counted in January. As I spoke about in a recent patron exclusive, which even non-patrons can purchase on Patreon now, Willis Carto was a dyed-in-wool antisemite, an apostle of the American Nazi Francis Parker Yockey. He had published Yockey’s neo-Nazi manifesto, Imperium, which was called “America’s Mein Kampf,” and he would go on to found the Institute for Historical Review, a pseudo-academic think tank dedicated to Holocaust denialism. Likewise, the Republican efforts to contest the election were trumpeted by Gerald L. K. Smith, a populist preacher, who undertook what he himself called a “campaign of pressure” on elected officials, “to persuade at least four Southern Governors to assert their leadership in this crisis moment,” meaning that he was trying to convince them to toss their election results, to essentially appoint fake electors. Smith too was more than just a conservative activist. He had risen to demagoguery in Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth campaign during the Depression, but then promptly turned to the right, seizing anti-communism as his cause. His turn to the far right came in the late thirties. He supported a white supremacist candidate running against Roosevelt, he joined William Dudley Pelley’s pro-Nazi Silver Shirts, and then he co-opted the America First Committee’s name to found the America First Party, an explicitly fascist organization under whose auspices he had run for president. By the time of his efforts to overturn the 1960 election, his organization was called the Christian Nationalist Crusade, and it was mostly known for opposing desegregation and circulating antisemitic literature, like Henry Ford’s The International Jew and the old Protocols of the Elders of Zion hoax. What we can see in 1960 is that Trump’s approach to baselessly contesting election results in 2020, from the claims of fraud to the pressuring of state officials to the insistence on supporters needing to rise up before electoral votes were tallied in January, were taken from an old playbook, one that had always been spearheaded by the Republican Party’s ultra-right wing base, over whom literal Nazis held sway.

Gerald L.K. Smith, the openly fascist preacher who pressured governors to cook up fake electors on behalf of Nixon.

And this fascist gameplan for the overturning of election results and installation of a losing candidate as the new U.S. President did not appear fully formed in 1960. It was not dreamed up on the spot by desperate partisans who believed misinformation about election fraud. No, it seems to have already been in the works in the 1950s, as a gambit that might help the far right install another demagogue into the White House: Joseph McCarthy. As has been pointed out by many a political analyst, if we were to search American history for a figure comparable to Donald Trump, the most apt comparison to be made is with McCarthy, whose reprehensible brand of politics justified its own “-ism,” just as now many, including myself, refer to MAGA as Trumpism, since his party is no longer recognizable. McCarthy entered national politics when he successfully beat out a popular Republican senator from Wisconsin, Bob La Follette, by portraying his rival as a Washington insider. La Follette was a vocal anti-communist at the time, and McCarthy, an opportunist politician, would seize on that as his cause célèbres. This is, of course, how McCarthy is remembered, but McCarthyism was more than this. McCarthy animated a rabid base among Republicans who believed he alone could be trusted in the corrupt swamp of Washington, and he did this through conspiracy-mongering. He sounded an alarm about Communist infiltration of the country, as most know, but also about Communists deeply embedded within the U.S. government, his own sort of Deep State conspiracy claim. He was disliked by his colleagues in Congress as a showboat, a loudmouth grandstander, but most came to fear him, for when McCarthy was crossed, he leveled baseless allegations against his fellow congressmen that tended to ruin their careers or even resorted to blackmailing them. More than one of those who moved against him ended up committing suicide because of it. While many in the Republican party regarded McCarthy as a reckless demagogue, and they recognized that he was a clear danger, because of his broad support among their base, they were afraid to cross him, and his grandstanding and conspiracy-mongering only grew bigger and wilder, boosted by press coverage even when that coverage was not favorable. As one biographer, Larry Tye, notes, McCarthy recognized “that there was no worse a penalty for a big lie than for a little one, but that only the big ones drew a crowd,” so he went big, claiming that he had verified lists of “card-carrying” Communists who had infiltrated the State Department and the federal government, though he never made a single credible accusation or produced any reliable evidence. Instead, he sought further media attention and power by conducting baseless witch hunts that turned Americans against each other and ruined the lives of countless individuals. In the end, the tide turned, public opinion of him shifted, and his congressional colleagues arranged a formal censure of his lying and flouting of congressional rules. Despite the needle moving on public perception of him, his base continued to support him, no matter what. According to a quotation by pioneering pollster George Gallup, “Even if it were known that McCarthy had killed five innocent children, they would probably still go along with him,” which sure sounds like Trump’s own claim that he could shoot someone and not lose any followers. And indeed, McCarthy’s supporters marched on the capitol that day, hoping to intimidate the senators who intended to censure their demagogue. As part of the theatrics of this protest at the Capitol, McCarthy supporters sent bundles of petitions opposing the censure to Capitol Hill in an armored truck, directing the armed guards tasked with delivering the petitions to brandish their firearms as they unloaded and presented them, a show of force that afterward prompted a Senator to call for an investigation of the guards and the group responsible.

Any who are interested in hearing more about Senator McCarthy and understanding how McCarthyism stands as a clear predecessor of Trumpism should go and listen to the second season of Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra, which delves deeply into this topic, tracing the history of far-right extremism in mainstream American politics and showing what happened in the past when its influence on sitting members of Congress was exposed. In season two, she makes clear the obvious parallels between McCarthy and Trump. There is first the obvious, that Joseph McCarthy’s right-hand man, Roy Cohn, who would later serve as Richard Nixon’s personal advisor, mentored Donald Trump in the ‘80s. But beyond this very concrete connection, there are the likenesses, which should be apparent to anyone who sees clearly. McCarthy galvanized a rabid base through conspiracism and claims of a “threat from within”; he lied incessantly, and his followers nevertheless trusted him and him alone; he turned all political discourse toxic, and even those in his party felt powerless to rein him in; and when his downfall was imminent, his supporters marched on the Capitol in hopes of obstructing Congress and preventing the ruin of their idol. Disturbingly, just as Trump has support from and disquieting connections to neo-Nazis, as I have recently discussed, so too McCarthy had clear if clandestine contacts among fascist organizations and Nazis in the U.S. One of the first times that McCarthy tried to make a name for himself by spreading lies and disrupting official proceedings was during his first term, when as an observer on an investigatory subcommittee looking into a Nazi massacre of U.S. POWs, he brought disorder to the investigation, interrupting to spread proven lies about the Nazi soldiers being mistreated and claiming that their prosecution was driven by revenge. This was known Nazi propaganda that was used throughout the Nuremberg trials. Some thought McCarthy was just grandstanding, but others believed he was motivated by antisemitism and a genuine sympathy for Nazis. There were reports that he frequently used antisemitic slurs and that he was known to hold up a copy of Mein Kampf and say, “That’s the way to do it.” A year after he acted as a Nazi apologist in that subcommittee, he accepted an invitation to speak at a Christian Nationalist Party event by known fascist Gerald L.K. Smith, the very same man who a decade later would try to pressure governors to appoint fake electors for Richard Nixon. Francis Parker Yockey, author of America’s Mein Kampf, Imperium, who as a former Nazi agent had himself worked to defend Nazis in the Nuremberg trials and was then a fugitive from justice, was also slated to speak at the event and delivered a fiery rant there about “white Christian Germans” being being railroaded in sham trials, because “Jews control the world today.” McCarthy pulled out of the event because of criticism in the press, but his people would later reach out to fugitive Nazi spy Francis Parker Yockey and hire him to ghostwrite a speech for McCarthy. That same year, McCarthy launched a smear campaign against Anna Rosenberg, a Jewish woman appointed Assistant Secretary of Defense. His ally in that campaign was a prominent Ku Klux Klansman, and their opposition to her appointment focused mostly on her being a “Jewess” and therefore harboring “Socialistic ideas.”

Willis Carto, the neo-Nazi propagandist and Holocaust denier who first tried to get demagogue Joseph McCarthy nominated for president by the Republican Party, and later spread lies about widespread election fraud in the 1960 election and tried to foment an ultra-right wing uprising ahead of the early January certification of election results in order to see Nixon fraudulently installed as the Chief Executive.

While all of this may seem utterly disqualifying for McCarthy, it did not stop the rise of his political star. His congressional colleagues may have viewed him as a defender of Nazis and a man without ethics, but his base viewed him as a defender of America against a Communist enemy within, and the extreme right, who still wanted a fascist leader for America and received McCarthy’s signals of sympathy for Nazism very clearly, thought that he could be their man. In 1956, as the Republican National Convention approached, a campaign was organized to hijack the Republican party and install the demagogue Joseph McCarthy as their presidential nominee. Eisenhower was already the presumptive nominee, but the plan was to distribute anti-Eisenhower pamphlets and circulate petitions at the convention, convert enough delegates to the cause, and flip the party to McCarthy. Some conservatives in the media even feared they could do it, one of them writing, “McCarthy will have no compunctions at all about wrecking the Republican Party if this seems to serve his purposes.… His supporters have the true mark of the fanatic. They are not interested in facts. The endless exposure of McCarthy’s endless untruths do not affect them…. Serious observers on Capitol Hill take seriously the possibility that McCarthy could ride to national power on the wreckage of the Republican Party.” Among those who spearheaded the effort at the convention was Willis Carto, Yockey’s neo-Nazi apostle, who would, just 4 years later, rouse the Republican electorate with baseless claims of widespread voter fraud in the 1960 election, encouraging them to rise up and prevent the peaceful transfer of power in January. In the end, of course, the effort to hijack the party for McCarthy failed and Eisenhower was nominated, but regardless, the far-right machine behind McCarthy was intent on getting him into the White House by hook or by crook. If he could not take over the Republican Party, then maybe they could get him into power as a third-party candidate. While it would be virtually impossible by fair and legal means to overcome the difficulties that a third-party candidate faces in our electoral system, they had a plan to sidestep those hurdles. A group of former America First Committee members, who had worked with Nazi sympathizers and Nazi agents to keep America out of the war, and including one former congressman implicated in the Great Sedition Trial of 1944, in which sitting congressmen stood trial for actively and knowingly spreading Nazi propaganda, cooked up a plot in 1956 to get McCarthy elected president by concocting fake elector slates. One conservative radio figure, Clarence Manion, described the plot this way: “We can get our wish by qualifying a slate of American presidential elector candidates in our respective states. In a number of states, patriots are already far advanced on these necessary prerequisites.” You may recognize this as the very same plot that Nixon supporters pursued in 1960 and as the same scheme that Trump himself recently employed in his efforts to overturn the lawful election results of 2020. In the end, this effort died because Joseph McCarthy himself suddenly died a few months later from hepatitis, likely worsened by his abuse of alcohol. McCarthyism died with him, becoming just a disgraceful chapter in American politics that nearly everyone, Democrat or Republican, now regards in a negative light. And this is what we should all hope will be the fate of Trumpism, that it will be relegated to the history books as nothing more than a shameful moment in American history that we overcame.

If we are to trace the roots of Trump’s fake elector scheme back through history, though, we must look to its earliest appearance, in the contested election of 1876, which prompted legislation a decade later to ensure no such elector slate shenanigans would ever again disrupt the proper certification of election results. The election of 1876 was the most contentious in U.S. history, threatening to throw the country back into Civil War and resolving only with an unprecedented compromise that would effectively end Reconstruction in the South. If you want to hear more about this unwritten political agreement, check out my episode from 2020, The Smoke-Filled Room. For our topic, we only need to understand the situation that Congress found itself in when convening to count electoral votes. The candidate Rutherford Hayes needed the electoral votes from South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida to win, whereas his opponent, Samuel Tilden, needed only the electoral votes of one of those states to win. In Florida, Tilden’s electors were certified by the state’s attorney general, but Hayes’s electors claimed to also be certified by the canvassing board. In Louisiana, the result of the gubernatorial election was still in question, and two competing governors were both claiming to have certified different slates of electors. Then in South Carolina, though Hayes’s electors were duly certified by the governor, Tilden’s electors sent a certificate with their votes, falsely claiming to be “duly and legally appointed by and for the State of South Carolina.” It would later be revealed that the Tilden campaign was actively bribing Southern election officials to change the results. It was all such a mess that Congress had to convene a special bipartisan Electoral Commission to sift through everything, and amid the chaos, a new and completely fake slate of Tilden electors from Vermont, which had been indisputably won by Hayes, submitted votes to Congress after the deadline, claiming without any pretense of evidence to be the official electors. Tilden was clearly gaming the system, but the fact was that he had a strong case for winning Florida, which would have given him the presidency. In the end, Congress’s backroom compromise, which put Hayes in the White House instead, was widely viewed as a miscarriage of democracy. Ten years later, the Electoral Count Act was passed that left it up to each individual state to resolve their own disputes in certifying results.

One hundred and forty-four years later, these flaws in our electoral system remained. While the law of the land left it up to state officials to determine results and certify electors, Trump’s machinations show that a candidate might still corruptly pressure a state official to change results, as was done back in the 19th century. In the wake of January 6th, when Trump pressured his Vice-President to reject electoral votes, another law was passed, the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022, which among other things clarified what a Vice-President actually does when counting electoral votes, making clear that their role is “solely ministerial,” with no power to accept or reject or otherwise resolve disputes. This change, while a good thing, really does nothing to address the threat of continued malfeasance when it comes to fake elector plots. And Trump now appears poised to exploit these loopholes again in 2024. According to Associated Press reporting, in several battleground states, including Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, Trump’s fake electors, who have proven themselves willing to pervert the will of the people, have wormed their way into positions of power, assuming roles as election officials and sitting on election commissions. These are the state positions that hold so much power when it comes to counting or miscounting votes, choosing what electors to certify, and essentially determining what votes are counted by Congress. And what is especially disturbing is that Trump has started to indicate that voting won’t actually matter in this election, stating over and over in his stump speeches, “We don’t need votes.” During this campaign, Trump has repeatedly insisted that he doesn’t need people to vote for him in order to win. As I have said before, I am not typically one to engage in accusations of conspiracy, but when corrupt efforts to subvert democracy are so clear, exposed by investigative journalists and special counsel investigations, when the wrongdoing is so blatant, and when those involved telegraph so openly their intentions to continue, we should all acknowledge it and sound the alarm. I very much worry that, even if Trump suffers an undeniable loss in November, as he did in 2020, the believers of his Big Lie of election fraud, who have already proven themselves willful participants in his Slow-Motion Coup, will abuse their power on the state level, resulting in the certification of the wrong electoral votes. I further worry about the appearance of competing fake electoral vote certificates in Congress this January, because even if Kamala Harris is only following the proper orders and procedures in her role as Vice President by counting only the duly certified votes, it may be claimed by Republican Senators that she is favoring votes for her. With enough Republican senators signing objections, it is not unlikely that the election results could then depend on the outcome of cases in state courts and could be sent to the Supreme Court, as was the case in 2000, with Bush v. Gore, and this packed Supreme Court bench has proven itself more than willing to cater their interpretations of law to suit conservative whims. It is a dire prediction, and one I greatly hope does not come to pass. But whether or not such a constitutional crisis does occur in this election, the takeaway here is that, to safeguard democracy, the electoral college needs to be carefully reformed, or done away with altogether in favor of the popular vote.

This election year, remember, once election day is done and the votes are counted, there is one candidate who will readily accept defeat, but there is another who will fight tooth and nail to overturn their loss. We cannot let a loser cheat their way to victory.

Slow-Motion Coup: Trump's Fake Electors Scheme

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