Stealing an election in broad daylight
ml1 said:
how about a law that says Congress must accept duly certified electors from each state? Sure there are other ways to cause mischief if people are determined (like states refusing to certify electors representing the voters' choice). But in a year like this where all 50 states have certified their results, and their electors have cast their legitimate, there should be absolutely no reason to question any state's slate of electors.
“Sure there are other ways” is a significant loophole, it seems to me. “In a year like this,” maybe. In a year when Harrisburg threatens to go the other way, not so much. If I had to bet, I’d wager that state legislatures are more susceptible to tilting to partisan pressure than Congress is, because their majorities are often more unbalanced. Your opinion may differ.
PVW said:
Well if I'm a lawyer with enough pecuniary or ideological motivation, I imagine I can get quite a bit of mileage out of "duly certified."
how? the vote is either certified by the state or it's not. how would one expect to succeed in challenging a state's official certification undo what's already been done?
DaveSchmidt said:
“Sure there are other ways” is a significant loophole, it seems to me. “In a year like this,” maybe. In a year when Harrisburg threatens to go the other way, not so much. If I had to bet, I’d wager that state legislatures are more susceptible to tilting to partisan pressure than Congress is, because their majorities are often more unbalanced. Your opinion may differ.
I do not believe this is true. Republican governors and secretaries of state in the swing states rebuffed Trump's demands because it would have been illegal for them to have refused to accept the audited vote totals.
DaveSchmidt said:
drummerboy said:
You might want to reconsider that thought.DaveSchmidt said:
How would a popular-vote direct presidential election avoid the same issue?
OK, I have. What am I missing? How would eliminating the Electoral College safeguard certification from attempts to reverse results?
Nothing is an absolute safeguard of course, but in this election, Trump would have to try and remove 7 million votes scattered across a multitude of states instead of the hundred thousand or so and 4 states that he's trying to remove now. Even he's not dumb enough to try that.
In 2000, the issue was a few hundred votes due to the EC, instead of the 500k votes in the popular vote. To say nothing of the fact that without the EC, the 2000 vote wouldn't have been challenged at all.
drummerboy said:
Nothing is an absolute safeguard of course, but in this election, Trump would have to try and remove 7 million votes scattered across a multitude of states instead of the hundred thousand or so and 4 states that he's trying to remove now.
Makes sense. Thanks for walking me through that. Wasn’t too hard, was it?
ml1 said:
PVW said:
Well if I'm a lawyer with enough pecuniary or ideological motivation, I imagine I can get quite a bit of mileage out of "duly certified."
how? the vote is either certified by the state or it's not. how would one expect to succeed in challenging a state's official certification undo what's already been done?
Isn't this the current situation? The states have duly certified their elections. Some members of Congress are denying this. If the law says "Congress must accept duly certified electors," and I'm Ted Cruz, I just say that I do not believe the electors were duly certified and I will not accept them.
I'm not disagreeing with you on the need to improve our laws and overall make our process far more democratic. I think my posting history has a number of time where I make that argument. But it's also true that, at the end of the day, there's only so far process and law can take you. Why does Trump have so much support in his attacks against democracy, and why has he failed? The context, I think, is about decreasing support for such challenges and less about trying to make it impossible to mount such a challenge.
PVW said:
Isn't this the current situation? The states have duly certified their elections. Some members of Congress are denying this. If the law says "Congress must accept duly certified electors," and I'm Ted Cruz, I just say that I do not believe the electors were duly certified and I will not accept them.
The argument, I gather, is that a law barring Congress from doing anything about the state certifications would render whatever Cruz said completely irrelevant.
PVW said:
ml1 said:
PVW said:
Well if I'm a lawyer with enough pecuniary or ideological motivation, I imagine I can get quite a bit of mileage out of "duly certified."
how? the vote is either certified by the state or it's not. how would one expect to succeed in challenging a state's official certification undo what's already been done?
Isn't this the current situation? The states have duly certified their elections. Some members of Congress are denying this. If the law says "Congress must accept duly certified electors," and I'm Ted Cruz, I just say that I do not believe the electors were duly certified and I will not accept them.
I'm not disagreeing with you on the need to improve our laws and overall make our process far more democratic. I think my posting history has a number of time where I make that argument. But it's also true that, at the end of the day, there's only so far process and law can take you. Why does Trump have so much support in his attacks against democracy, and why has he failed? The context, I think, is about decreasing support for such challenges and less about trying to make it impossible to mount such a challenge.
in such a hypothetical scenario what would the mechanism for Sen. Cruz to do anything more than flap his gums?
ml1 said:
PVW said:
ml1 said:
PVW said:
Well if I'm a lawyer with enough pecuniary or ideological motivation, I imagine I can get quite a bit of mileage out of "duly certified."
how? the vote is either certified by the state or it's not. how would one expect to succeed in challenging a state's official certification undo what's already been done?
Isn't this the current situation? The states have duly certified their elections. Some members of Congress are denying this. If the law says "Congress must accept duly certified electors," and I'm Ted Cruz, I just say that I do not believe the electors were duly certified and I will not accept them.
I'm not disagreeing with you on the need to improve our laws and overall make our process far more democratic. I think my posting history has a number of time where I make that argument. But it's also true that, at the end of the day, there's only so far process and law can take you. Why does Trump have so much support in his attacks against democracy, and why has he failed? The context, I think, is about decreasing support for such challenges and less about trying to make it impossible to mount such a challenge.in such a hypothetical scenario what would the mechanism for Sen. Cruz to do anything more than flap his gums?
He'd just abstain from voting. Get enough other senators to abstain, and now Congress has declined to accept the results.
ml1 said:
PVW said:
ml1 said:
PVW said:
Well if I'm a lawyer with enough pecuniary or ideological motivation, I imagine I can get quite a bit of mileage out of "duly certified."
how? the vote is either certified by the state or it's not. how would one expect to succeed in challenging a state's official certification undo what's already been done?
Isn't this the current situation? The states have duly certified their elections. Some members of Congress are denying this. If the law says "Congress must accept duly certified electors," and I'm Ted Cruz, I just say that I do not believe the electors were duly certified and I will not accept them.
I'm not disagreeing with you on the need to improve our laws and overall make our process far more democratic. I think my posting history has a number of time where I make that argument. But it's also true that, at the end of the day, there's only so far process and law can take you. Why does Trump have so much support in his attacks against democracy, and why has he failed? The context, I think, is about decreasing support for such challenges and less about trying to make it impossible to mount such a challenge.in such a hypothetical scenario what would the mechanism for Sen. Cruz to do anything more than flap his gums?
Maybe I am missing something, but why does congress have any role in creating the output of an election? (certifying, accepting, counting, approving, or whatever).
Votes should be counted, preferably by officials that are independent, and that should determine the winner. Anything that gets added to that process is unnecessary and will increase opportunities for mayhem (and that also includes EC).
basil said:
ml1 said:
PVW said:
ml1 said:
PVW said:
Well if I'm a lawyer with enough pecuniary or ideological motivation, I imagine I can get quite a bit of mileage out of "duly certified."
how? the vote is either certified by the state or it's not. how would one expect to succeed in challenging a state's official certification undo what's already been done?
Isn't this the current situation? The states have duly certified their elections. Some members of Congress are denying this. If the law says "Congress must accept duly certified electors," and I'm Ted Cruz, I just say that I do not believe the electors were duly certified and I will not accept them.
I'm not disagreeing with you on the need to improve our laws and overall make our process far more democratic. I think my posting history has a number of time where I make that argument. But it's also true that, at the end of the day, there's only so far process and law can take you. Why does Trump have so much support in his attacks against democracy, and why has he failed? The context, I think, is about decreasing support for such challenges and less about trying to make it impossible to mount such a challenge.in such a hypothetical scenario what would the mechanism for Sen. Cruz to do anything more than flap his gums?
Maybe I am missing something, but why does congress have any role in creating the output of an election? (certifying, accepting, counting, approving, or whatever).
Votes should be counted, preferably by officials that are independent, and that should determine the winner. Anything that gets added to that process is unnecessary and will increase opportunities for mayhem (and that also includes EC).
I think DS asked this earlier, but in the case where there really IS a dispute around an election, how should that be settled? Let's say that SoS Raffensperger gave in to pressure and just declared Trump the winner in GA, in opposition to the actual vote totals. How, ideally, would that be settled? Or, in your hypothetical where it's not an elected SoS but some independent official certifying the vote -- suppose we have reason to believe that official took a bribe to wrongly declare a winner, what should be the process for challenging that?
(I'm not necessarily arguing that the answer is "Congress" -- just legitimately asking what the ideal process should be)
basil said:
DaveSchmidt said:
I think nohero, in an earlier comment here, accurately laid the onus on our commitment to democracy. If that holds, elections work. If it doesn’t, there’s no foolproof way to protect them.
All it took was one con man to break our democratic system?
When 70 million people can be convinced to vote against their own best interests, yes.
PVW said:
He'd just abstain from voting. Get enough other senators to abstain, and now Congress has declined to accept the results.
maybe legislation should remove any approval process for Congress. Just have the Senate count the certified votes. End of story.
PVW said:
basil said:
ml1 said:
PVW said:
ml1 said:
PVW said:
Well if I'm a lawyer with enough pecuniary or ideological motivation, I imagine I can get quite a bit of mileage out of "duly certified."
how? the vote is either certified by the state or it's not. how would one expect to succeed in challenging a state's official certification undo what's already been done?
Isn't this the current situation? The states have duly certified their elections. Some members of Congress are denying this. If the law says "Congress must accept duly certified electors," and I'm Ted Cruz, I just say that I do not believe the electors were duly certified and I will not accept them.
I'm not disagreeing with you on the need to improve our laws and overall make our process far more democratic. I think my posting history has a number of time where I make that argument. But it's also true that, at the end of the day, there's only so far process and law can take you. Why does Trump have so much support in his attacks against democracy, and why has he failed? The context, I think, is about decreasing support for such challenges and less about trying to make it impossible to mount such a challenge.in such a hypothetical scenario what would the mechanism for Sen. Cruz to do anything more than flap his gums?
Maybe I am missing something, but why does congress have any role in creating the output of an election? (certifying, accepting, counting, approving, or whatever).
Votes should be counted, preferably by officials that are independent, and that should determine the winner. Anything that gets added to that process is unnecessary and will increase opportunities for mayhem (and that also includes EC).
I think DS asked this earlier, but in the case where there really IS a dispute around an election, how should that be settled? Let's say that SoS Raffensperger gave in to pressure and just declared Trump the winner in GA, in opposition to the actual vote totals. How, ideally, would that be settled? Or, in your hypothetical where it's not an elected SoS but some independent official certifying the vote -- suppose we have reason to believe that official took a bribe to wrongly declare a winner, what should be the process for challenging that?
(I'm not necessarily arguing that the answer is "Congress" -- just legitimately asking what the ideal process should be)
Some non-partisan body, preferably at the Federal level, but if it must then at state level.
In your example, if a SoS was bribed or gave in to pressure, I am pretty sure he would be breaking the law, so law enforcement would be the proper way to challenge / fix that.
In no way should the arbiter be a partisan body such as Congress, or even SCOTUS.
PVW said:
I think DS asked this earlier, but in the case where there really IS a dispute around an election, how should that be settled? Let's say that SoS Raffensperger gave in to pressure and just declared Trump the winner in GA, in opposition to the actual vote totals. How, ideally, would that be settled? Or, in your hypothetical where it's not an elected SoS but some independent official certifying the vote -- suppose we have reason to believe that official took a bribe to wrongly declare a winner, what should be the process for challenging that?
(I'm not necessarily arguing that the answer is "Congress" -- just legitimately asking what the ideal process should be)
I'm pretty sure if Raffensperger did that in Georgia he'd go to jail. He can't just unilaterally discard the audited vote total.
ml1 said:
PVW said:
He'd just abstain from voting. Get enough other senators to abstain, and now Congress has declined to accept the results.
maybe legislation should remove any approval process for Congress. Just have the Senate count the certified votes. End of story.
Senate / House should not be involved in this at all. Not even for counting votes, because then they will refuse to count certain votes from certain states. We shouldn't have a partisan body play a role in determining the outcome of elections hey have a vested interest in. That's like a student grading his own homework.
One thing Congress has going for it as an arbiter for a democratic election is that — for all the flaws of partisanship, gerrymandering and Senate disproportionality — it is a democratically elected body.
ml1 said:
PVW said:
I think DS asked this earlier, but in the case where there really IS a dispute around an election, how should that be settled? Let's say that SoS Raffensperger gave in to pressure and just declared Trump the winner in GA, in opposition to the actual vote totals. How, ideally, would that be settled? Or, in your hypothetical where it's not an elected SoS but some independent official certifying the vote -- suppose we have reason to believe that official took a bribe to wrongly declare a winner, what should be the process for challenging that?
(I'm not necessarily arguing that the answer is "Congress" -- just legitimately asking what the ideal process should be)I'm pretty sure if Raffensperger did that in Georgia he'd go to jail. He can't just unilaterally discard the audited vote total.
Who would be doing the arresting? Who'd be bringing the charges?
DaveSchmidt said:
One thing Congress has going for it as an arbiter for a democratic election is that — for all the flaws of partisanship, gerrymandering and Senate disproportionality — it is a democratically elected body.
It's the tension between "partisanship, gerrymandering and Senate disproportionality" and "democratically elected body" that I worry about the most. Safeguards, if they are to be found, are in making our elected representative bodies more truly representative. Processes, as I'm trying (maybe unsuccessfully) to point out in my replies to basil and ml1, can always be worked around with sufficient determination and support.
Ultimately, government only works if and when we want it to work. A country is an act of collective imagination. The fact that so many Americans are buying into a different vision is extremely disturbing, but I don't think it's the sort of thing that can be fixed by updating the Electoral Count Act of 1887 or amending the 12th amendment.
PVW said:
DaveSchmidt said:
One thing Congress has going for it as an arbiter for a democratic election is that — for all the flaws of partisanship, gerrymandering and Senate disproportionality — it is a democratically elected body.
It's the tension between "partisanship, gerrymandering and Senate disproportionality" and "democratically elected body" that I worry about the most. Safeguards, if they are to be found, are in making our elected representative bodies more truly representative. Processes, as I'm trying (maybe unsuccessfully) to point out in my replies to basil and ml1, can always be worked around with sufficient determination and support.
Ultimately, government only works if and when we want it to work. A country is an act of collective imagination. The fact that so many Americans are buying into a different vision is extremely disturbing, but I don't think it's the sort of thing that can be fixed by updating the Electoral Count Act of 1887 or amending the 12th amendment.
while this is true, it shouldn't be as easy as it appears to be to overturn an election and stay within the parameters of the Electoral Count Act. What we've been seeing this year makes it seem that the law practically invites partisan shenanigans. We just didn't know it until now.
IMO, the potentially fatal flaw of the constitution is assuming away political parties and relying on competing power being expressed as competition between branches. Ambition counteracting ambition I think is a good principle in setting up a government, but it was naive to assume "faction" could be done away with via clever constitutional design.
PVW asks: " Who would be doing the arresting? Who'd be bringing the charges?"
Georgia AG/DOJ?
PVW again: "Ultimately, government only works if and when we want it to work."
And arguably a good portion of the "conservative"/Republican crew don't want it to work. A problem that's been going on for some time now, imo. How to fix/mitigate???
PVW asks: " Who would be doing the arresting? Who'd be bringing the charges?"
Georgia AG/DOJ?
PVW again: "Ultimately, government only works if and when we want it to work."
Yes, and arguably a good portion of the "conservative"/Republican crew don't want it to work. A problem that's been going on for some time now, imo. How to fix/mitigate???
DaveSchmidt said:
PVW said:
Isn't this the current situation? The states have duly certified their elections. Some members of Congress are denying this. If the law says "Congress must accept duly certified electors," and I'm Ted Cruz, I just say that I do not believe the electors were duly certified and I will not accept them.
The argument, I gather, is that a law barring Congress from doing anything about the state certifications would render whatever Cruz said completely irrelevant.
If both houses of Congress were held by the same party as the incumbent President and they were willing to go so far as to be willing to reject the will of the voters, why don't you think that they wouldn't just amend the law restricting their ability to do anything but "count the votes?"
Steve said:
DaveSchmidt said:
PVW said:
Isn't this the current situation? The states have duly certified their elections. Some members of Congress are denying this. If the law says "Congress must accept duly certified electors," and I'm Ted Cruz, I just say that I do not believe the electors were duly certified and I will not accept them.
The argument, I gather, is that a law barring Congress from doing anything about the state certifications would render whatever Cruz said completely irrelevant.
If both houses of Congress were held by the same party as the incumbent President and they were willing to go so far as to be willing to reject the will of the voters, why don't you think that they wouldn't just amend the law restricting their ability to do anything but "count the votes?"
Exactly.
And also, who believes that this recorded call to the Georgia SoS is the only call he made?
Steve said:
If both houses of Congress were held by the same party as the incumbent President and they were willing to go so far as to be willing to reject the will of the voters, why don't you think that they wouldn't just amend the law restricting their ability to do anything but "count the votes?"
I’ll leave that for ml1, since it wasn’t my argument.
PVW said:
IMO, the potentially fatal flaw of the constitution is assuming away political parties and relying on competing power being expressed as competition between branches. Ambition counteracting ambition I think is a good principle in setting up a government, but it was naive to assume "faction" could be done away with via clever constitutional design.
I am not a constitutional scholar, but there seem to be several flaws. They were apparently so obsessed with populists and kings alike that they came up with all these silly constructs (like the EC) that basically accomplished the opposite.
I really don't understand this obsession with the constitution and the founding fathers. A bunch of slave owners 250 years ago? Give me a break.
basil said:
Exactly.
And also, who believes that this recorded call to the Georgia SoS is the only call he made?
I'm sure it's not. He attempted to contact Raffensberger 18 times before this call happened. We know that Republican state legislators from Michigan and Pennsylvania were invited to the White House during the time leading up to certification in those states. He's behaved inappropriately several times.
This call to the Georgia SoS was recorded (because of a prior call from Lindsey Graham that also asked them to influence the election results) so maybe it's the only one we'll hear.
I get the feeling we're in for a long day in Congress on the 6th. I think the result is inevitable at this point, but I'm worried about what it takes to get there. And what violence may ensue once they announce Congressional certification. Lots of people are buying this idea that Pence can somehow reverse the whole process on Wednesday. But at least a handful of Senators (Murkowski, Romney, Toomey to name a few) have said they won't challenge the election results, so there's no majority in either chamber to reject any state's electors.
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Well if I'm a lawyer with enough pecuniary or ideological motivation, I imagine I can get quite a bit of mileage out of "duly certified."