I don’t know how many time I’ve read an article or online comment from somebody warning that Republicans will refuse to certify some states’ election results and so the House will elect the President. No, the House only votes if no candidate has a majority of submitted electoral votes, and that number is reduced if somehow a state doesn’t certify it’s election so failure to certify = House decides is just wrong.
What other scenarios have you read that make you think people need to take a civics lesson before they panic?
Now that you mention it, this is the first election cycle since I became an adult that I haven’t heard the “President So-and-so is going to cancel the election!” CT from someone in the opposition. I’ve heard it about Clinton in 2000, Dubya in '04 and '08, Obama in '12 and '16, and Trump in '20.
I guess not even the looniest Republicans think Joe Biden wants to become a dictator.
Do you have a cite for this? The 12th Amendment states a candidate is elected “if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed” - it doesn’t say anything about submitted votes.
It seems there are mathematical ways for the tricksters to cause the number of votes to be tied. For instance, if the final total is D=271, R=267, then all they need is to negate 4 D electors to make a tie. If Hawaii (with 4 electors) went D but did not certify their votes, then it seems like that would mean the net result is D=267 (271-4). Now the electors are tied and it would go to the House to decide.
Right, but to do this, you would need to have a state which is (a) likely to go for Harris, barring any vote-tabulation shenanigans, (b) has local officials in place who are diehard Trumpists, and who are willing to do this, (c) has state laws which allow for excessive stonewalling in tabulation and reporting, and (d) has state courts which are GOP-controlled and are willing to play along.
Other than, possibly, Georgia, I’m not sure that such a state exists.
If GA goes to Harris, I guess we’ll find out what sort of moral integrity Kemp has. GA has 16 electors. That’d be a pretty significant swing if they can negate those votes.
In 2020, there was an issue that a part of SE Arizona was going to refuse to certify, and the AZ Sec State (final arbiter) said, ok, if you cannot certify, then I guess we will have to go ahead and use the votes we have. That would have flipped a House seat blue, so they certified real fast. I am not sure how some states would handle it this time.
That’s true. However, the state election board is filled with die-hard MAGAts who have made several new rules just in the past few weeks that could be used to gum up the works if it looks like Harris is carrying certain big precincts, like Fulton County. Brad Raffensberger, the secretary of state, has denounced the new rules as partisan hackery, they’re that bad. See, they don’t have to make the whole state not turn in electoral votes, just get a few counties so delayed that they’re not able to be counted at all before the mandatory deadlines. Counties that voted for Harris, of course.
Since the beginning of August, the five-member state election board has adopted rules that allow local election boards to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” into election results before they are certified, and to allow any local election board member “to examine all election related documentation created during the conduct of elections prior to certification of results”. The same rule also requires local boards to reconcile any discrepancies between the total number of ballots cast and the number of voters who check in. If it can’t reconcile the numbers, the board is authorized to come up with a way to figure out which votes count and which do not.
If, at the end of this process, one or more states still do not produce results, the number of electoral votes required to win a majority — and therefore the presidency — would be reduced accordingly. In the above-described hypothetical, Georgia refusing to finalize its results would reduce the total number of electoral votes needed to win to 262, from 270. Republicans would win with 265 electoral votes, to the Democrats’ 257.
So the Republicans could totally steal a win by not certifying results. In the hypothetical like the one in that article, where Trump is winning without Georgia, Harris wins Georgia narrowly, the GOP refuses to certify the result in Georgia, Trump has stolen the election. Not the most likely outcome given the state of the polls (Pennsylvania could be the state that swings it in that manner but I don’t think the GOP would be in a position to not certify the results there), but completely plausible.
She must have fixed her editorial, because originally she mistakenly thought that 270 is always necessary to win.
Regardless, I’m not looking to ways Republicans could cheat to win. There are enough threads on that. I’m looking for scenarios people have espoused that are impossible because they depend on procedural steps that don’t exist. What are the scenarios we don’t need to worry about?
I’m glad a single catch-all ‘election nightmare scenarios’ thread has been started. The topic has cropped up in several separate threads, and it will be handy to have a single place to address concerns. I will share some material I’ve already written in other threads.
While efforts to impede [election] certification are not new, never before have they been deployed on such a large and coordinated scale. For this reason, little academic attention has been paid to the mechanics of state certification frameworks. This Article fills that gap to demonstrate why, and how, state certification frameworks can combat the ongoing threats against them. It begins by providing a detailed overview of how election certification works and how recent attacks on the process have targeted and disrupted certification using false claims of widespread election fraud. It then delves into the rich but often overlooked history of certification as a non-discretionary duty to demonstrate that those attacks flouted hundreds of years of well-established American legal history; recognizing that discretion created opportunities for crises and election fraud, early courts and legislatures purposefully shaped certification into a mandatory, non-discretionary duty. The Article concludes with a roadmap for election officials, candidates, and advocates to resolve future attacks on the certification process in eight key battleground states likely to play significant roles in the 2024 election cycle.
The local-level rat-fuckery [viz the “election nightmare scenarios” of the OP’s title - b] is not going unopposed. That’s the whole point of Democracy Docket and Marc Elias’s advance efforts. Most of the potential bad actors are already exposed (Rolling Stone article, Rachel Maddow , etc.) and the remedial filings, lawsuits, and countersuits to overcome the bad-faith officials are already drafted.
There’s an idea floating out there that a some number of local officials somewhere can summarily “refuse to certify” and suddenly that whole state’s election edifice comes crashing down. And that it will happen in every single swing state, and that will be it – the election is then thrown to the House! Thrown to the Supreme Court! That’s just not how it’s going to go down
Media coverage of election-denying officials have greatly exaggerated how much impact individual refusals to certify can really have. Significant procedural delays in election certification can’t be effected by single and small-group actors. Remedies already exist and the mousetraps are already sprung (see @Aspenglow ’s post above). No one’s being caught off-guard this time around.
Lastly, @Aspenglow happened to drop this very helpful link into the thread:
I didn’t start that. I started an “election nightmare scenarios that can’t happen” thread. But I’ve learned that threads I start have a habit of getting away from me.
Ah. The thread title fooled me – I hadn’t realized it was incomplete.
Either way, I think you’re on the right track. Rat-fuckery will be attempted, will make A LOT of news which will misrepresent the possible outcomes … and in the end, will have no effect at all on the outcome of the general election.