Election experts have cast cold water on a theory that Republican-controlled legislatures in states that Joe Biden won could ignore the official ballot count and send President Donald Trump’s electors to the Electoral College.
“Just on the legal side, there’s pretty much impossible-to-overcome obstacles,” Adav Noti, who is the chief of staff at the Campaign Legal Center and is a member of the National Task Force on Election Crises, told Politico.
Although the exact way that electors are selected varies by state, Noti points out that a clause in the Constitution says that Congress has the power to decide “the Time of chusing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes.”
“What people are saying is, ‘Well, we can determine to appoint electors ourselves.’ Which is true, if that had been the determination they made for the 2020 election,” Noti said. “But every state in the nation, as they have for more than a century, has made a different determination, which is to appoint electors by popular vote. And that’s what the legislature decided, and that is what, in fact, happened on Election Day.”
He added that Congress “set the time of appointment as Nov. 3. So the legislative power to determine the method of appointment lasted until Nov. 3.”
Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig and Jason Harrow, executive director and chief counsel of Equal Citizens, wrote on Lawfare that the Supreme Court “has unanimously undercut the core premise” of the idea that a rogue legislature could appoint their own electors in its recent decision in a case that Lessig and Harrow lost.
They wrote: “If the electors have lost their superpowers to an emerging democratic consensus, then legislatures must have lost them as well. It would be a complete perversion of the Framers’ design to remove the constitutional discretion of electors but accept a constitutionally unconstrained power in the state legislatures.”
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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