Comment by somenameforme
4 days ago
In 2016 there was an organized, and partially successful, effort to get 37 electoral voters to change their electoral vote to somebody other than whom they were pledged to vote - Trump. It was intended to change the result of the election by forcing a "contingent election", in which the House of Representatives would determine the President, owing to the esoteric nuances of US electoral law.
Would you consider this an insurrection? In your terms it was "a naked attempt to change the outcome of the election."
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_electors_in_the_2016...
Calling it partially successful when Clinton lost more electoral votes to faithless electors than Trump did and it had zero impact on the outcome of the election is interesting.
But no, because electors deciding how they cast their votes is a matter of state legislation, not federal, and it is a wildly different thing than the candidate himself trying to install fake electors.
The faithless electors were chosen as part of the political process, and the founders expressly stated that the electors having the freedom to cast their vote was part of the safeguard against mob rule by an uninformed electorate. Hamilton, for example, wrote extensively of this in the federalist papers. This is explicitly one of the reasons why we have the electoral college at all, instead of a popular vote. If anything, I wish they had had the foresight to codify it in the Constitution or Bill of Rights so that states could not prevent it from happening. They wrote extensively of what they wanted the EC to be but did not do enough to make reality match their expectations in a durable manner.
Meanwhile Trump explicitly worked to install a group of illegally selected electors while riling up a mob to attempt to put a halt to the certification.
Trying to compare electors casting their vote based on how the founding fathers envisioned the electoral college as working to a sitting president being involved in a coordinated effort to create and install fake electors, cause the certification of the election to fail by inciting a mob to storm the capitol, and oh, telling Georgia to "find me the votes" is absurd.
It doesn't matter the margin by which Clinton lost. The point of trying to turn the electors is that the US constitution requires a candidate receive a majority of electoral votes. If nobody does, then the House of Representatives gets to determine who becomes President. And they came far closer to overturning the election than some guys rioting around the Capitol did, since there was a viable path towards the goal.
Your perception of the electoral college is somewhat biased. The college itself serves a practical purpose - elections in the US are extremely decentralized by design. States can do pretty much whatever they want, only later constrained by various constitutional amendments. So when a state A gives you a number, that number does not necessarily mean the same thing as when state B does the same. The electoral college normalizes election results by requiring each state to convert their numbers into a common format. And instead of relying on the Federal government trying to deal with millions of votes, it's only 538.
Similarly, the scheme in support of Trump was not only not illegal, but even anticipated by the electoral count act which made it such that if the House/Senate disagreed with votes included or excluded by the Vice President, then they were free to overrule it by a simple majority vote. The VP's role was then later changed to a purely ceremonial one in a new law passed in 2022, largely to prevent this angle in the future.
And you're still trying to compare mechanisms that exist within the system and are codified with someone attempting to operate entirely outside of it. And no, they weren't far closer at achieving their goal - they didn't get anywhere near the number of required faithless electors and were never going to get anywhere near the required number of faithless electors. Meanwhile, attempting to delay or totally obstruct the certification allowed for several pathways that Trump and his team viewed as potentially viable. Hell, just convincing Raffensperger to do what Trump wanted him to do would have also gotten him most of the way there.
And yes, obviously part of the point of the EC is dealing with a smaller number of votes instead of every vote. None of that is a counterargument to what I said. Again, the founding fathers literally wrote about how faithless electors were a feature and not a bug in their eyes. There's a reason they had the 'Hamilton Electors' moniker.
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