This is had to be done, I’m afraid. We may have the most notorious case of election fraud in American history on our hands:
The congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob has issued subpoenas to 14 individuals who cast bogus electoral votes for the former president in seven states won by Joe Biden in 2020.
The move comes as two Democratic attorneys general have asked federal prosecutors in recent days to investigate whether crimes were committed in assembling or submitting the “alternate” Trump slates. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco this week confirmed prosecutors’ consideration of what she termed the “fraudulent elector certifications.”
In a statement Friday, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the select committee investigating the Capitol attack, said the panel had obtained information that multiple advisers to former president Donald Trump or his campaign had used the actions of the bogus electors to “justify delaying or blocking the certification of the election during the Joint Session of Congress on January 6th, 2021.”
“The Select Committee is seeking information about attempts in multiple states to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including the planning and coordination of efforts to send false slates of electors to the National Archives,” Thompson said. “We believe the individuals we have subpoenaed today have information about how these so-called alternate electors met and who was behind that scheme.”
He encouraged the 14 individuals to cooperate so that the committee can “help ensure nothing like that day ever happens again.”
Ten of the subpoenaed individuals had gathered Dec. 14, 2020, the day of the electoral college vote, in the capitals of five states that Biden had won: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin. They declared themselves “duly elected and qualified” and sent signed certificates to Washington purporting to affirm Trump as the actual victor.
The remaining four individuals cast “alternate” electoral votes for Trump in Pennsylvania and New Mexico and sent certificates explicitly stating that they were to be considered only if the election results were upended.
At the time, Trump’s allies claimed that sending rival slates to Washington echoed a move by Democrats in a close race in Hawaii six decades earlier. They said they were merely locking in electors to ensure they would be available if courts determined that Trump had won any of those states.
But election experts have noted that unlike the Democrats in Hawaii in 1960, Trump had no plausible basis for challenging Biden’s clear and legitimate win in 2020. Multiple courts, recounts and audits have found no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
Here’s the story of the Hawaii situation back in 1960, which shows that Richard Nixon had much more integrity that Donald Trump:
— John F. Kennedy barely edged Richard Nixon in the 1960 popular vote, winning by fewer than 117,000 votes, or less than two-tenths of 1 percentage point. He won enough states, though, that when Congress convened on Jan. 6, 1961, to officially certify who would be inaugurated two weeks later, Kennedy had an undisputed lead of nearly 100 votes in the Electoral College.
That meant three disputed electoral votes from Hawaii, which could have been a source of controversy in a close contest and tested our political system, didn’t really matter.
How Nixon handled those disputed votes is worth remembering, however, at a time when President Donald Trump is telling his supporters that the only way he loses is if there’s rampant fraud, and lawyers around the country are scrambling to brush up on the intricacies of the Electoral Count Act of 1887.
Hawaii was a new state in 1960 holding its first presidential election — a concept that’s also worth remembering as the possibility of adding Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia to the union is portrayed as somehow outrageous.
Turnout topped 93 percent in Hawaii. The state’s result was close, just as the nation’s was overall. Nixon initially appeared to be the winner by 141 votes, and the Republican governor declared him the winner. But a judge granted the Kennedy team’s request for a recount. As it dragged on, the judge rejected GOP attempts to stop the count. When the mid-December date came for the Electoral College to meet — this year it’s Dec. 14 — both Republican and Democratic electors sent their votes to Washington to be counted.
Kennedy eventually was declared the winner in the Hawaii recount by 115 votes, but the two sets of certifications were waiting when the joint session of Congress convened. Democrats, including Rep. Daniel K. Inouye, were ready to lodge an objection if the GOP slate was counted, but the presiding officer — the Senate president, who also is the vice president: i.e., Nixon — pushed the issue aside.
“He resolved it in a rather statesmanlike way by using parliamentary procedure,” State University of New York professor James A. Gardner said in a recent webinar organized by the New York State Bar Association. “He asked for unanimous consent that the votes of the Democratic electors would count. So he resolved this against himself.”
Nixon wasn’t the first vice president who had to preside over the opening of electoral votes that declared his opponent the winner, and he wasn’t the last. The most recent was Al Gore, who had conceded the 2000 election after the Supreme Court stopped a recount in Florida, effectively handing the state’s electoral votes, and the presidency, to George W. Bush. At that joint session in 2001, House Democrats in the Congressional Black Caucus tried to object to the acceptance of Florida’s electoral votes. But their complaint did not have a Senate co-sponsor as required by law, and it was dismissed by Gore.
Bush’s victory hinged on 537 votes in one state also, as you’ll recall. Gore won the popular vote by over 500,000 votes.
Donald Trump lost by tens of thousands of votes in the states he was contesting and he lost the popular vote by 7 million votes. He has had to create the fantasy of a massive national conspiracy encompassing thousands of people at all levels of government, including members of his own party, to justify his claims that the election was stolen. And yet he has managed to convince tens of millions of his followers that it’s true. Some of them are now facing subpoenas for what they did, as they should. A few are already in jail.
When is it going to occur to these people that this man does not care about anyone but himself?