Projection is so overused to describe Republicans’ “I know you are but what am I?” stances on, well, almost anything, that I cringe even typing it here. Nevertheless.
Monday night, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reported via Politico that Donald Trump supporters in Michigan and Arizona forged and submitted to the National Archives documents purporting to be the official electors — Trump electors — from those two states won in 2020 by Joe Biden. This comes to three instances where this occured. Previously, another Trump group from Wisconsin tried it:
On December 14, 2020, Wisconsin’s duly certified Presidential Electors met at the State Capitol to cast the state’s ten electoral votes in the Electoral College. On the same day, ten other individuals gathered to execute a competing set of documents, purporting to cast Wisconsin’s votes for candidates that lost the statewide election (as confirmed through the recount process and multiple judicial rulings). These “fraudulent electors” acted in violation of state law, which specifies that the people of Wisconsin choose the Presidential Electors through their votes on the November ballot.
These fraudulent electors sent the false documents they created to the U.S. Congress, in an apparent effort to make sure that they would be counted as Wisconsin’s actual ten electoral votes on January 6th.
Politico’s Nicholas Wu uncovered the Michigan and Arizona frauds via a public records request to states for documents being sought separately by House Jan. 6 investigators. Wu cleverly got around the investigation’s secrecy by asking the states for the documents House investigators had requested from the states.
Politico reports:
As Trump’s team pushed its discredited voter fraud narrative, the National Archives received forged certificates of ascertainment declaring him and then-Vice President Mike Pence the winners of both Michigan and Arizona and their electors after the 2020 election. Public records requests show the secretaries of state for those states sent those certificates to the Jan. 6 panel, along with correspondence between the National Archives and state officials about the documents.
Spokespeople for the Michigan and Arizona secretaries of state declined to comment on the documents. The offices confirmed that Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, both Democrats, and their staff met with the panel in November.
“They mostly discussed election administration in Arizona, the 2020 elections, threats/harassment directed toward the office, and the Cyber Ninja’s partisan ballot review,” said Hobbs’ spokesperson C. Murphy Hebert.
Benson and her staff took questions from the committee on the 2020 election and events leading up to the Jan. 6 riot, according to Tracy Wimmer, a spokesperson for Benson.
The National Archives sent emails to the Arizona secretary of state on Dec. 11, 2020, passing along the forged certificates “for your awareness” and informing the state officials the Archives would not accept them.
Arizona then took legal action against at least one of the groups who sent in the fake documents, sending a cease and desist letter to a pro-Trump “sovereign citizen” group telling them to stop using the state seal and referring the matter to the state attorney general.
“By affixing the state seal to documents containing false and misleading information about the results of Arizona’s November 3, 2020 General Election, you undermine the confidence in our democratic institutions,” Hobbs wrote to one of the pro-Trump groups.
That group’s leader, Lori Osiecki, had told the Arizona Republic in December 2020 that she decided to send in the certificates after taking part in post-election rallies and after attending a daylong meeting in Phoenix that had included Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani.
The group that forged the Michigan certification had not used the state seal, and it appears state officials there took no further action after the Archives rejected it.
Maddow note similarities between the Michigan and Wisconsin documents, down to language, formatting and fonts. The Arizona forgery is different.
These groups not only “undermine the confidence in our democratic institutions,” as the Arizona secretary of state responded, but could face prosecution.
Was someone coordinating this conspiracy to upset the valid vote count? Maddow asked. “Who believes we’ll find more where this came from? Raise your hand.”
“Trump lost 25 states in 2020,” Maddowblog’s Steve Benen reminds. “How many of them included election opponents willing to send fake documents to government offices?”
When it comes to Republican accusations that it is Democrats who are trying to rig elections and cheat, projection is exactly the right word.
UPDATE: Via Twitter, it seems Politico is late to the game. This story came out nearly a year ago and never got traction. And it was seven states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.