The Vote Suppression & 12th-Amendment Hail Mary Republicans Are Counting On
As you read this, mail-in ballots are being delivered.
The 2024 presidential election is officially underway.
By every reliable metric, Vice President Kamala Harris is beating the convicted felon — whose campaign is imploding — and is likely going to be the next President of the United States. This means in a mere two months we could be celebrating the election of the first woman and the first person of South Asian descent to ascend to the highest office.
But before we pop champagne corks and assume a Harris/Walz administration is a fait accompli, we would be remiss if we didn’t take a few minutes to acknowledge the political gymnastics that could still unfold that could put the adjudicated rapist and former reality-TV slumlord back in the White House.
First, remember that when we cast our votes for president, we aren’t actually voting for a person but a slate of persons — electors. These are non-office-holding party members charged with submitting their respective states’ results to Congress in December.
Remember in 2020 when MAGA loyalists in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, and New Mexico posed as official electors and attested in unauthorized documents Donald Trump had “won”?
The scheme was to submit competing slates so then-Vice President Mike Pence would refuse to certify the election on January 6. Trump and his sycophants were so sure Pence was going to do it that when he didn’t, insurrectionists chanted “Hang Mike Pence” as they stormed the Capitol that fateful day our government was nearly overthrown. Some even erected a gallows for Pence in front of the Capitol.
Pence later explained in an interview:
I think it’s important that the American people know what happened in the days before January 6. President Trump demanded that I use my authority as vice president presiding over the count of the Electoral College to essentially overturn the election by returning or literally rejecting votes. I had no authority to do that.
While President Biden isn’t going to do anything like that, and Kamala Harris, as President of the Senate, will be the one presiding over the Electoral College certification, it is still possible for states to submit competing slates.
If neither candidate reaches the 270-vote minimum to win the Electoral College, according to the 12th amendment of the Constitution, the election gets thrown to the House of Representatives, and each state will have one vote.
With 26 republican-controlled states, we can predict with near-absolute certainty Kamala Harris isn’t going to be the 47th President of the United States.
As progressive political commentator and author Thom Hartmann wrote recently:
Their plan is to so screw things up, mostly by refusing to certify votes or claim “irregularities,” that the vote will ultimately end up being handled by now-Speaker Mike Johnson, the guy who literally led the election deniers’ coup attempt on January 6th.
If we think they haven’t been planning for this the past three and half years, we’re kidding ourselves.
Heather Digby Parton wrote in her Salon piece, “Republicans are using ruse of “election integrity” to pull off another round of Big Lie chicanery”:
The current Speaker Mike Johnson wrote an amicus brief back in 2020 on behalf of Trump asking the Supreme Court to essentially overturn swing-state results. There are concerns that if he is the speaker next January 6, he will use the power of his office for Trump’s benefit once again. Politico reports there are several possibilities, ranging from changing the rules, which merely exist by tradition, for the counting of the votes on January 6 to asking the courts to rule on the constitutionality of the ECRA (Electoral Count Reform Act). That would inevitably end up in the Supreme Court as well.
With six ultra-right wingers--three of whom Trump appointed — that two months ago ruled president have “total immunity” for “official acts” — this is a dream scenario that would alter the country’s trajectory for generations.
In fact, it appears that if they really push this, all roads lead to the High Court, which is terrifying…This is not a court I would trust to be judicious when it comes to this presidential election.
The Center for Media & Democracy explained that in the states that submitted fake elector slates there are now fifty 2020 election deniers running for Congress, 81 running local republican groups, six candidates for statewide offices, and 102 who are current members of state or county election boards. Some of these people participated in the attempted coup on January 6, 2021.
Thom Hartmann warns:
Keep an eye on this; if/when Trump loses on November 5th, the fireworks will really begin, with Roger Stone — who orchestrated the successful “stop the steal” effort in Florida in 2000 that put Bush into the White House even though Gore won the state and the national vote — running the program again this year. It could be a real mess, and many Republicans are now planning for violence and even advocating outright bloodshed in a second Civil War.
And it seems as though the GOP is banking a large part of this scheme on the state of Georgia, where the twice-impeached felon vying for his old job was arrested last year because of charges linked to his attempt to overturn the last election.
Ever since Kamala Harris started campaigning for the office of President after President Joe Biden bowed out of the race there has been a sudden call among some in the state for hand-counted ballots in a blatant ploy to, as Reuters reports, “cause delays, introduce errors and lay the groundwork for spurious challenges in the battleground state.”
Former gubernatorial candidate, Georgia state senator Stacey Abrams, is calling this a “nightmare scenario.”
As reported in Mother Jones, Abrams stated:
It is not just a nightmare scenario; it’s a very real possibility. There’s a timetable, and that timetable presumes that everything is settled by the federal deadlines that are set. A state’s inability to meet that deadline or refusal to meet that deadline, throws the election to the House of Representatives. That is not the electoral body that should be deciding this election. It should be the people of the state.
For a stark analysis of the hi-jinx happening down in the “peach state,” check out (for free!) investigative reporter Greg Palast’s new documentary Vigilantes Inc: American’s New Voter Suppression Hitmen.
Some may insist this is all just left-wing fear-mongering, and it’s too outrageous to happen.
That might be an acceptable premise if it hadn’t happened before.
As historian and host of the brilliant podcast Letters From an American wrote:
In 1824, electors split their votes among four candidates — Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay and William Crawford — and none won a majority in the Electoral College. Although Jackson won the most popular votes and the most electoral votes, when the election went to the House, the state delegations chose Adams, the son of former president John Adams.
It happened again in 1876.
“Republicans lost the popular vote by about 250,000 votes out of 8.3 million cast, but kept control of the White House through the Electoral College,” Cox wrote.
She added:
In 1888 it happened again. Incumbent Democratic president Grover Cleveland won the popular vote by about 100,000 votes out of 11 million cast, but Republican candidate Benjamin Harrison took the White House thanks to the 36 electoral votes from New York, a state Harrison won by fewer than 15,000 votes out of more than 1.3 million cast. Once in office, he and his team set out to skew the Electoral College permanently in their favor.
She concludes with a contemporary analog:
A Republican president hasn’t won the popular vote since voters reelected George W. Bush in 2004, when his popularity was high in the midst of a war. The last Republican who won the popular vote in a normal election cycle was Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush, in 1988, 36 years and nine cycles ago. And yet, Republicans who lost the popular vote won in the Electoral College in 2000 — George W. Bush over Democrat Al Gore, who won the popular vote by about a half a million votes — and in 2016, when Democrat Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by about 3 million votes but lost in the Electoral College to Donald Trump.
In our history, four presidents — all Republicans — have lost the popular vote and won the White House through the Electoral College. Trump’s 2024 campaign strategy appears to be to do it again (or to create such chaos that the election goes to the House of Representatives, where there will likely be more Republican-dominated delegations than Democratic ones).
Republicans know they can’t win on policy since the only policies they have are ones to benefit the ultra wealthy.
So what do they do?
They cheat.
They do not want democracy.
They want oligarchy.
But they know Americans outside the extremely wealthy do not.
So to maintain their wealthy donors’ hegemony, they work tirelessly to prevent voters from exercising their civic duty to choose whom they want to represent them.
And it isn’t like it’s been a secret.
Republicans have been wagging their voter suppression flag in our faces since Paul Weyrich, the Heritage Foundation founder and “founding father of the conservative movement,” announced as much in a speech to a religious right group in Dallas in 1980.
They count on voter turnout being low, so they help it along with vote suppression, voter ID laws, partisan gerrymandering, foreign interference, and, of course, the anachronistic Electoral College.
17 states and Washington, DC, with a total of 209 electoral votes, have passed the “National Popular Vote Interstate Compact,” which requires all electors to hand their votes to the winner of the national popular vote. To leapfrog a constitutional amendment necessary to obviate the Electoral College, an additional 61 electoral votes are needed to meet the 270 threshold.
This isn’t going to happen within the next month, and republicans are gleefully hoping for a repeat of the chaos of January 6, 2021.
They’re hoping this time they succeed.
