Since the state house and Senate of both Michigan and Pennsylvania are Republican controlled, can’t they just send electors to the electoral college for Trump instead of Biden?
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Since the state house and Senate of both Michigan and Pennsylvania are Republican controlled, can’t they just send electors to the electoral college for Trump instead of Biden?
6 replies on “Am I right on this?”
The PA GOP legislators stated last week that they will not do this. I think that state law requires them to send electors according to the vote. I do not know if there is a provision in their state law to provide for if the voting process breaks, or if the courts declare the election void.
It is almost certain (N.B., I have not personally researched this point) that a change in state law would be required to enable the legislature to choose the electors without regard to the vote. So they would have to meet, draft a bill, ram it through, and get the governor to sign it by December 9th. In Michigan the governor is a Democrat so would veto it, don’t know about PA.
If the courts declare the election void, it is remotely possible that a state could hold a re-vote. I personally think that’s highly unlikely, but if it did, and the state was forced by the courts to hold the election in compliance with its own laws to the letter (what a concept!), hopefully throwing out the electronic voting machines, then that would probably be the very best outcome. (Though I think I recall that Michigan has same-day voter registration, so maybe not.) But I don’t think there will be enough time to count and certify a re-vote by December 10th.
So the second-best option is for the courts to declare the election void in one or more states, which makes those states unable to certify and send electors, so that neither candidate has the 270 votes in the Electoral College needed to win when it meets on December 10th. Then the Constitution provides that the (new) House of Representatives will decide, not with 435 votes, but with 50 votes, one vote from each state delegation. I read somewhere that only 19 states have a majority of Democrats in their state delegations, and that number may have even decreased in this election. So that ought to be a landslide for Trump.
Here in PA, Emperor Wolf would surely veto any Republican attempt to change the election laws.
Right, and it just occurred to me that, if PA is like my state, the legislature’s even being able to convene right now would require the governor to call a special session. So that’s a no-go.
BTW someone (Instapundit?) posted recently a NYT story from a 1994 election in PA where there was so much election fraud that a judge not just voided the election but declared the opponent (a Republican) the winner. I think the race was for a state legislature.
So there’s precedent.
Following up on this again, I just saw part of an interview of Judge Starr by Mark Levin about the plain reading of the Constitution that the state legislatures are in charge of choosing their presidential electors, implying that they could just ignore the vote and send Trump electors.
However, I’m not sure how the legislature of, say, Pennsylvania would be able to ignore their own legislation on how they choose their electors. And I am assuming that it is spelled out in their electoral code that governs how the state conducts its elections. (That assumption could be wrong.)
They did point out that where there appears to be a conflict between who has the power to appoint the electors, whether the legislature or the governor, the U.S. Constitution wins–i.e., the legislature cannot delegate the power to choose electors to the governor. This seems to be at issue in PA. (So it seems the legislature has passed laws about how the presidential electors are selected.)
If Trump continues to fight in court, he is likely to win on equal protection grounds. This is receiving less attention than the straight-up fraud, but some voters in some counties not being able to “cure” their absentee ballots, which were then thrown out, while in other counties the ballots were either illegally counted without being cured, or the election workers went out of their way to offer those voters the opportunity to cure their ballots, is a serious equal protection violation.
Trump may win on other grounds too. Illegal ballots being illegally counted in direct violation of the state’s own election code disenfranchise voters in other counties by cancelling their votes. The courts can and should require the state to follow its own election statutes. The violations are so blatant that if we saw them in another country whose election we were vetting, we would pronounce the other country’s election not free or fair.
And it’s untrue that Trump can’t get enough ballots thrown out to swing the election back to him. He absolutely can, probably in at least four states, maybe more.
That would depend on what exactly the process is for certifying elections. I even live in PA and I don’t know the procedure. (I know, bad citizen.) I’d be surprised if the legislature has the authority to overturn the vote.