US voters confirm Trump’s victory in process targeted by fraudulent voters in 2020 | US election 2024

Electors in all 50 states will meet on Tuesday to ratify the second election of Donald Trump to the presidency, a process that is typically no more than a ceremonial step to the White House for the winner of an election.

Usually it lacks drama. But four years ago on December 20, 2020, Republican activists in seven states won by Joe Biden – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – gathered to sign fake certificates proclaiming victory for Donald Trump and Mike Pence, is sent to the National Archives and to Congress.

Prosecutors have described the intent behind this act of “fake voters” as providing a rationale for the vice president to either declare Trump president or throw the election to Congress to decide on January 6, 2021. On that day, rioters broke into the US Capitol to intent to undermine the results of the election.

The Constitution states that on the first Tuesday after the second Wednesday in December following a presidential election, each state’s presidential electors gather in each state’s capitol to cast their electoral college votes for president and vice president. The Electoral College is an artifact of the politics of slavery; created at the insistence of Southern states because it initially increased voting power in states with larger slave populations due to the distributive value of the three-fifths compromise.

The re-election of Trump in November by a decisive margin, combined with the relative acceptance of the results by his political opponents, suggests there will be no second wave of shenanigans on Tuesday.

Nevertheless, Congress tightened the language about how the process works after the Jan. 6 rebellion, the latest of periodic tweaks to the 248-year-old tradition of the Electoral College. The Act on reform of the election count clarified that the legislatures of states that use an election to choose a president cannot simply appoint electors after the fact if there is some kind of election “failure.”

The reforms require the executive branch of each state to certify an election at least six days before the count, and that this certification is conclusive unless a state or federal court finds otherwise. It limited the kinds of objections members of Congress could make to the voters’ votes. It also ensured that a mob with bad intentions could not change the result by explicitly designating the role of the Deputy Speaker in counting votes as a ministerial, ceremonial act.

The only thing the 2022 reforms didn’t do is require states to hold a presidential election.

Stated in Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the Constitution: “Each State shall, in such manner as the Legislature directs, appoint a number of electors equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in Congress …”

The US Supreme Court ruled in Bush v Gore that states don’t actually have to hold an election at all, but if they do, it must comply with 14th Amendment equal protection rules.

The “way” state legislatures have chosen in the past has included allowing voters to choose them by electoral district, or having legislators choose themselves—as Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, New Jersey, and South Carolina did in the first presidential election.

Electors appointed to the college are required to vote for the winning candidate. Some vote for another anyway. It is rare – fewer than 100 out of more than 14,000 people throughout the country’s lifetime. The modern record is seven, set in 2016.

So-called faithless voters have never overturned an election, but scores of voters have voted for a candidate outside their party over the years. Thirty-three states and Washington DC have state laws that prohibit voters from casting a ballot for someone other than the winner of the election. In 2016, four electors for Hillary Clinton in Washington state cast their votes for Colin Powell or Faith Spotted Eagle instead and were fined $1,000 for doing so.

Five states make the act of a faithless voter a felony; California law makes breaking ranks a felony punishable by up to three years in prison.