When pundits speak about 2020 being a dry run or practice for 2024, this is what they mean. There is a theory that under the 12th Amendment, state legislatures have exclusive control of which electors are sent to the electoral college. And there is no requirement that they send electors for the person with the most votes, nor can a court review their actions. This morning, Politico reports that emails from Trump attorney John Eastman show that Eastman attempted to get members of the Pennsylvania legislature to throw out some absentee ballots and thus give Trump “cover” to send Trump electors to be counted on December 15th, and January 6th. According to Politico:
Attorney John Eastman urged Republican legislators in Pennsylvania to retabulate the state’s popular vote — and throw out tens of thousands of absentee ballots — in order to show Donald Trump with a lead, according to newly unearthed emails sent in December 2020, as Trump pressured GOP lawmakers to subvert his defeat.
This recalculation, he posited in an exchange with one GOP state lawmaker, “would help provide some cover” for Republicans to replace Joe Biden’s electors from the state with a slate of pro-Trump electors, part of a last-ditch bid to overturn the election results.
Per the exchange, Eastman suggested that GOP legislators could simply cite their concerns with Pennsylvania’s absentee ballot procedures and then use historical data to “discount each candidates’ totals by a prorated amount based on the absentee percentage those candidates otherwise received.”
In other words, simply manipulate vote tabulations into a figure you deem acceptable and in line with who you want to win.
Republicans understand that if every American voted, they would be a permanent minority party from now until a point in time when they produced a platform with policies and ideas that appealed to people and helped people generally. Well, the Republicans are not about to change what they believe in, and thus, we’ve seen an increasingly desperate party. They go from Voter I.D. to ending mail-in voting, ending Sunday “Souls to the Polls,” making it illegal to hand out food and water, automatically tossing voters off rolls if they didn’t vote in the last two elections, and now to the point where a state legislature can literally ignore its state’s own vote and adjust it to what it wants.
Experts who have the sources have been warning that the 2024 strategy is to utilize the 12th Amendment “theory” (That state legislatures have total control over which electors are sent and are not constitutionally required to send those of the majority of voters) and if that doesn’t work, get the election to the House of Representatives, where the Republicans will nearly always win due to the small conservative states’ votes weighted equally with California, New York, and Illinois.
Eastman’s emails are a look inside the MAGA movement’s plans for 2024 as the Right moves further and further away from Democracy.
Jason Miciak believes a day without learning is a day not lived. He is a political writer, features writer, author, and attorney. He is a Canadian-born dual citizen who spent his teen and college years in the Pacific Northwest and has since lived in seven states. He now enjoys life as a single dad of a young girl, writing from the beaches of the Gulf Coast. He loves crafting his flower pots, cooking, while also studying scientific philosophy, religion, and non-math principles behind quantum mechanics and cosmology. Please feel free to contact for speaking engagements or any concerns.