Substitute while the actions of the article are loading
A House of Representatives committee examining the uprising has received new emails from a lawyer who helped devise Donald Trump’s plot to cancel the 2020 election. They reveal a whole new level of intrigue behind the effort, which was even more more evil than previously thought.
But emails also raise promising questions: What do these new revelations tell us about how subsequent efforts to steal the presidential election could develop? And could the conditions be different next time in a way that could facilitate such a scheme?
The answers to these questions are worrying. But they also point to a way we can protect ourselves from the worst. Will Congress act?
Emails from attorney John Eastman say he is calling on Republican Republican lawmakers in Pennsylvania to question the total number of votes for 2020 in order to create a cover to verify a list of presidential voters for Trump. Politico reported the emails the commissioned committee received on Jan. 6 from the University of Colorado, where Eastman was working at the time.
The key revelation: Eastman’s scheme had an extra layer to it. We already knew that his plan focused on urging Trump’s vice president to abuse his role in the congressional vote count to undermine the election results.
Follow Greg Sargent’s opinions. Follow Add
Now, in these new emails, Eastman is seen inventing a pretext for state legislatures to annul Joe Biden’s voters and verify Trump’s fake voters. He advised a Pennsylvania lawmaker to use a sophisticated formula – based on treating mailed ballots as illegitimate – to extrapolate that enough votes for Biden are invalid to show that Trump won the popular vote.
Then, once you’ve done that math, you’ll have a significant lead for Trump, who will support the legislature’s argument for adopting a Trump voter list – completely within your power to do so anyway, but now backed by a flawless popular vote. This would help provide some coverage.
Eastman advises the legislature to argue that Biden’s voters, certified by the governor, are thus “insignificant.”
This is an unusual thing. Eastman advised that the state legislature should devise a justification from a fig leaf to declare Biden’s correct voters certified by the governor invalid and instead certify Trump’s voters.
First, note that Trump himself did something similar. When Trump pressured Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” votes to make him the winner, it was intended to create a similar pretext for replacing Biden’s voters with Trump’s.
“Eastman was not doing anything that Trump was not doing himself,” spokesman Jamie Ruskin (D-Md.), A member of the commission, told Jan. 6. “Both were trying to get election officials to replace fake actual votes.
“Eastman was trying to implant a new mathematical calculation that would lead to Trump’s victory in Pennsylvania,” Ruskin said.
These emails from Eastman show that manipulating the total number of votes to create a “cover-up” for state legislatures to appoint fake Trump voters is more important to the scheme than we knew.
Whether this creates more exposure for Eastman and others remains to be seen. But it also has other important implications: it reveals more clearly the way in which vicious actors can seek to undermine future elections.
Note that Eastman says almost aside that US lawmakers have the “power” to appoint new voters even if the total number of votes does not justify it.
“Eastman’s view is that the legislature has absolute power over the election of presidential voters,” election expert Richard L. Hayson told me, even if it meant “ignoring the will of the electorate” or “the previous rules of the legislature for how to elect them voters. “
In the future, Hassen notes, bad actors may see this as “a way to steal elections.”
There’s more: Many Republicans currently tied to Trump’s lies in 2020 are running for control of the election machine at the state level, including as secretary of state.
Most importantly, such people would be able to create exactly the pretext that Eastman envisioned. How? By using official status to question voting results, producing “cover-ups” for the US legislature and / or governor to certify fraudulent voters as a losing candidate. A Republican-controlled chamber can then count those voters and change staff or even elections.
Eastman outlined the plan. “This shows the country another strategic trap improvised by Trump’s team that can sit there for use by unscrupulous actors in future elections,” Ruskin told me.
Such a scenario may seem unlikely at the moment. Nevertheless, all this underscores the urgent need to reform the Electoral Code of 1887 in order to minimize risks to try something like that.
Properly implemented, the reform can help thwart a repeat of Eastman’s scheme. This may create a requirement that if a state-level attempt is made to certify fraudulent voters, Congress should only count the list that the courts deem legitimate.
“Congress absolutely needs to reform the ECA to make it clear that no government officials – neither governors, nor secretaries of state, nor state legislators – can manipulate which electoral votes they will count,” said legal expert Matthew Seligman, an ECA expert. I
“The only way to do that is to ask Congress to follow the court’s decisions about which voters are valid,” Seligman said.
If Congress does not take action, it would mean relying on the virtue of individual participants in the right places to thwart such a scheme. But given everything we’ve seen since January 6, institutional reforms seem like a far safer bet, wouldn’t you say?
Add Comment