Election Fraud, State and Federal

The 1A show had an hour this morning (not posted yet online, but it — plus its transcript — should be up soon) on the legal challenges facing Trump. The part I caught was about the upcoming charges related to trying to overturn the 2020 election, and particularly the fake elector scheme.

According to the 1A guests, the responses of the Michigan fake electors vary from defending their actions (because they still believe Trump won the state, despite losing by 150,000 votes), to calling the charges politically motivated, to saying they were duped by state party leaders. 

All of those responses irk me, but that last one may be the worst, because the woman who said it was recorded and played on the show, and she makes it sound as though she had no idea what was going on — as if she signs any legal document put in front of her.

Yes, she was duped, but she's an adult, not a child. She could have said "No" at any point.

That reminds me of this tweet from about a week ago by Mark Pitcavage @egavactip:

The ages of the [Michigan] people indicted are 70, 72, 55, 75, 71, 82, 65, 56, 73, 55, 76, 64, 81, 69, 68, and 69. Makes you wonder what their informational world was like.

A day later, economist Dean Baker tweeted this:

A Black woman got a 5-year sentence for trying to cast one illegal vote in Texas, I assume the Michigan-16 are looking at life behind bars.

Doug Muder wrote in his Weekly Sift for today that having state-based charges for each set of fake electors makes more sense than federal charges:

After all, trying to steal a state’s electoral votes is fundamentally an offense against that state. Also, the fake electors proceeded somewhat differently in different states, so they shouldn’t all face the same consequences. The Michigan electors created and signed a fraudulent certificate naming themselves as “the duly elected and qualified for President and Vice President of the United States from the State of Michigan” and casting Michigan’s 16 electoral votes for Donald Trump....

New Mexico’s fake electors, by contrast, signed a certificate “on the understanding that it might later be determined that we are the duly elected and qualified Electors” — a statement that seems considerably less fraudulent.

Trump and the henchers who helped wrangle all the state-party apparatchiks and fake electors would get federal charges.