Can they, during a recount, order suoervision and strict enforcement of voter rules?
What if massive fraud is found? Can they invalidate a group of votes or even order a revote for certain states?
And finally…could states pass “anti faithless elector laws” before Jan?
We’re in uncharted territory here. The Supreme Court “can” do just about anything. However, if they push too far, then some states might undertake to resist their dictates. Andrew Jackson famously flouted a SC ruling.
States could pass “faithless elector” laws…but they can’t control how the electors vote. A guy might betray his vote, and happily go to jail for it. The corrupted vote still counts, and there isn’t a damn thing on earth that can reverse it.
The idea of one or two people subverting an entire election …sounds like something that extraordinary measures would be taken to prevent even if we’ve known forever it could happen
What a shitshow.
That depends on the details of the law in each state. I’ve long forgotten the details about which state is which, but: In one state that was in the news about it, a faithless elector gets fined. In another state, a faithless elector gets kicked out of the electoral college, his vote is discarded, and another elector is chosen to take his place.
As for what the Supreme Court can do? Well, the first thing that the Supreme Court can do is decide what the Supreme Court can do.
I think state legislatures making a law requiring their electors to go to Trump is the only path the Republicans could take at this point to get a Trump win. I think that would work as far as the SCOTUS goes, but at least based on the current media narrative I don’t think state legislatures will go along with it at this point. I don’t think there’s any legal reason they couldn’t require a recount with their own rules, but I don’t think anything like that is actually feasible. I could be wrong but I think the fact that they had to separate ballots in PA shows that once they count the ballots there isn’t an obvious remedy to go back and check the signature or postmark or anything. So I think once they’ve counted, their isn’t really a remedy to change which ones are valid.
I think the path for Trump was to raise as much suspicion as possible about the votes and then get state legislatures to pledge their electors to him. It seems like since Biden is going to win by (knock on wood) 2 or 3 states, it’ll be more of a tall order to get multiple states to get in line. Plus, it doesn’t seem like Trump has done a good job at all of casting doubt about the process. I also think what happened in Arizona made Trump’s rhetoric really hollow since he had to argue for counting in one state and against counting in another.
The Supreme Court’s prime function is to hear cases that involve constitutional issues, it is not to pursue the totally unfounded claims of a megalomaniacal narcissist who is in total meltdown.
On the news last night, they named three states whose courts have thrown out Trump lawsuits because they were without merit. One judge threw out a Trump lawsuit claiming that the votes were being counted in secret when, under oath, they admitted that THEY HAD ACTUALLY BEEN INVITED TO WATCH THE PROCESS.
The man has never honored the dignity of his office and, apparently, he never will.
Underlining mine.
Which is why the legal attack is made upstream: that so many are invalid that the only safe thing to do is invalidate all of them.
If some court bought that reasoning there’d be little that could be done to reverse it. So far there’s little evidence of courts at any level buying this BS. Thank goodness.
Roberts will work like hell to keep SCOTUS out of it. Whether he can persuade two of his conservative colleagues to go along with him is another matter. He needs two of them because it requires only four to accept a case. But first there has to be a case. Say the Republican party in PA sues to have the counting stopped. The state supreme court throws out the case as without merit. Then it is appealed to the a US court which upholds the decision. All this takes some time. Then Thanksgiving recess and the secretary of the state certifies the result. What can SCOTUS do?
Well yes. There are two races taking place.
Race #1 is to prevent certification of results by the legal deadline, or by the practical deadline which may be a few days later. Absence of certification by the deadline opens the door to all sorts of backup plans / shenanigans, both those already contemplated in law, and those that can be ad hocced up at the moment by the state authorities, or invented from judicial whole cloth as an “emergency” measure.
And Race #2 is to get the counts completed and the results certified before the delaying tactics of the #1 racers get traction at a high enough level to matter.
Who runs SCOTUSblog?
I certainly approve of the idea, but would it actually work that way? Is there a “voting period” during which that could happen? Or do they all just “pull a trigger” in which case, no do-overs would be possible.
(Fight ignorance here: I had always thought it was a “pull the trigger” kind of vote.)
my question is if election rules are set by states, does SCOTUS have authority to overrule them?
Now that’s a good question. I wondered about it myself back when it was current in the news in 2016. In Colorado, the law allowed a faithless elector to be removed and replaced by one who will vote as required. In Washington, the law was that a faithless elector would be fined $1000, but I didn’t see anything about their vote being invalidated. After the 2016 election, Washington changed the law to be similar to Colorado.
I got all the above information from this Wikipedia page on the subject, which agrees substantially with how I remembered reading about it before.
Nowhere have I ever seen any answer to your question about the exact chronology of how things should play out. All the remedies described seem to be after-the-fact remedies. Yet it also seems implied that if an elector votes wrong (or abstains) then he is immediately on-the-spot dismissed and replaced along with his vote. Or else that it is somehow taken care of administratively after-the-fact.
It all makes it look like the formal act of having the electors vote is just a pro-forma ritual formality that has no reason to exist any more. We Murcans loves us some formal democratic rituals.