Feel free to chime in.
I did run some of this by a former U.S. Senator, who said, “McConnell (Yertle) has good lawyers,” and said he’d forward my question to one of them.
Also, my Supreme Court expert, Zen Master, who has yet to miss a single call including the Flynn result so far, said that he thought the USSC would uphold Bush v. Gore. Even if Roberts wanted to screw Trump, courts don’t overturn themselves, and this decision is quite fresh. Also, the “one man, one vote” thing would really run counter to overturning the deadline.
If California withheld it’s elector votes I believe it would go to the Supreme Court to make up some new “Constitutional” law. That would not be good for America with the Supreme’s liberal/RINO majority.
Think back to Al "Feeley" Franken.Lost on election night. Lost the first recount...but "won" the second recount by a few hundred votes.Imagine the same happening in PA,MI,WI...and even FL and NC.
In '16 it can be said that a few thousand votes in two or three states won it for the President. It wouldn't take much fraud to flip it to the Rats.
I'd wager that this will reach SCOTUS. But I wouldn't bet a nickel that they'll rule correctly.
if a State fails to submit its electors on time, they are not counted.
the crisis would occur if a State sends two sets of electors representing two different candidates
The USSC decision in Bush v. Gore was actually a bad ruling. Florida should have been left to their own devices, and if the place was so badly run that they couldn’t certify a slate of electors then their electors shouldn’t have been counted. That scenario has taken place at least a couple of times since the country was founded.
I think this is what you're looking for.
The Constitution lays this out in two parts.
Article II Section 1 says "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector."
The 12th amendment says "The person having the greatest Number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed..."
If a state fails to appoint electors, then the majority of appointed electors goes down. If Pennsylvania (20 EV) fails to appoint its electors, then the number of appointed electors drops to 518, and the majority becomes 260 EV to win.
People are stuck on the number 270, but that assumes a FULL Electoral College. If a state fails to certify, and fails to APPOINT its electors, then they simply don't participate in the Electoral College. In that case, the Electoral College is not bound by a 270 threshold. That threshold is reduced to a majority of the APPOINTED Electors who do participate.
This is where Article II offers the remedy:
If a state thinks it's in risk of defaulting on its Electoral College participation, then the legislature can exercise its plenary power to call a special session and choose to directly appoint their Electors, regardless of how the state's citizens voted.
-PJ
This is an easy one. There is NO Constitutional right for the populace to choose the electors. That's a matter for the states. The California legislature, for example, could decide to allow the Governor to appoint the electors, or for the state senate to vote on who the electors from that state will be. So there's no US Constitutional enfranchisement to begin with, and thus no disenfranchisment.
"Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors"
Here’s where there could be real trouble. Suppose a state narrowly goes for Trump. But that state has a Democrat Secretary of State. That person might refuse to certify his state’s results.
I never would have dreamed of such a possibility before this year. But many Democrats don’t just dislike Trump. Thanks to the media, they have an irrational, white-hot hatred of him. Anything is possible now.
My fear is that since a Georgia judge ruled that so-called mail-in ballots can have Election Day postmarks to be counted, that manufactured ballots for east coast swing states (e.g., Georgia, Florida, Pennsylvania) will be mailed from California after the polls close on the east but before post offices close on the west.
I don't recall hearing that the ballots must be postmarked in the state where the ballots are being cast. Once the MSM starts reporting on east coast election returns, Democrats can manufacture the needed votes in the west (maybe even Hawaii), and get them postmarked in time to mail to the east coast states.
According to the website 270toWin, here are the 2020 poll closing times for certain states:
This leaves plenty of time for ballots to be postmarked in California after poll returns begin to be reported in the east.
They don't even have to wait for all the polls to close. If they fear a Trump wave is coming, they can start postmarking ballots for central time zone states, too.
-PJ
Nov. 14 - Electors cast their votes
Jan. 6 - Congress counts the Electoral votes
Per Federal Law - the new Congress assembles
Per federal Law - the popular vote is to be cast by the Tuesday after the first Monday of Nov. (in practice, mailed ballots must be postmarked by this day but may be received sometimes later; for overseas military, the received by date is set by Congress) Mail-in states are a head ache to count.
The Constitution says that, to be elected President, a candidate must receive a majority of all electors appointed. So, if Gore could have delayed the appointment of electors from Florida, he would have won. The 2000 Florida recount was about NOT APPOINTING electors by Dec. 14th. The Supreme Court thwarted the effort.
This year, Republican-controlled states will be quick to count, as will Democrat-controlled states that Biden wins. BUT ... Democrat-controlled states that Trump wins, if Trump is re-elected, will have delayed counts so as to prevent the Electors from being appointed. This is the plan. This is this year’s Democrat plan to steal the election.
However, if we win the House and keep the Senate, we can steal the election back in January.
And, the Supreme Court will be sympathetic to any plea to require the appointment of electors once the attempt to delay appointment becomes obvious.
...here we are.
And this election is going to be a nightmare.
Most states have relaxed rules on requesting absentee ballots but they aren't sending ballots out to everyone unless they request them. So while more mail in ballots can be expected, but it's not a major change from prior elections. The failure of many people to request mail-in ballots who don't want to go to the polls will be one of the reasons for the depressed voter turnout.
There are 5 states that have a history of sending every voter a mail in ballot. And given that they didn't have delays in the past, I suspect they will be on time this year. That's Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, and Washington.
There are 4 more that have decided to mail ballots to everyone this year. That's California (D), Montana (R)(left up to the county), Nevada (D), New Jersey (D). If there are delays they will likely be from these 4 states.
And S. Dakota (R) is undecided whether they will mail ballots out to everyone.
how-vote-by-mail-works-in-all-50-states-for-election-day-2020
Most logical to me, is that the state’s failure to submit their electors by the deadline means that the totals are adjusted downward to reflect this.
That doesn’t mean logic will prevail.
“This seems to suggest that the “quorum” is not “all available states” but all states that submit electors. And while Congress has the precedent of not accepting some electors, it apparently has never forced a state to vote or submit electors. This it APPEARS that if, say, CA decided to withhold its electors, the quorum would drop by 55 electoral votes, and the number needed to win would drop to 191.”
That seems the most logical to me, but would also mean they would have no Congress reps.
Sadly, these people are desperate, and I don’t think that logic, fairness, or the law matters to them.
A few comments, Larry:
“As best I can tell, there is no penalty for NOT delivering an elector slate. The Founders (and everyone else, apparently) though it ludicrous that any state would voluntarily not take part in an election & deny its citizens the right to vote.”
I believe this is correct, and that no consideration was ever given to the idea that a State would fail to deliver a slate of Electors.
“In Bush v. Gore, a 5-4 ruling held that FL could NOT recount statewide ballots because it would have missed the Dec. 12 (as I recall) deadline that year. The USSC ruled that it was a violation of the “one man, one vote” to only partially count and SINCE they couldn’t count the whole state, Gore’s partial recount was invalid.”
I met Ben Ginsburg, the lead counsel in the Florida cases, at an Ohio Association of Election Officials conference a couple of years ago. I told him I’d been waiting for years to ask him a single question: “What would the Bush Campaign have done had the decision in Bush V. Gore allowed recounts to continue past the deadline to certify Electors?”
His answer? This was no worry, as the Florida Legislature would have appointed it’s own set of Electors, bound to vote for Bush, to the Electoral College. Bush would have been elected, and Ginsburg’s team he would have then filed to have the recount stopped as being moot.
I believe action along these lines would be taken in states where certification is obviously being delayed. Frankly, I expect Trump to win by a margin large enough to be declared the winner on Election Day.
Just to remind folks even if this goes to the house they only get to electors per state. Do republicans control more states than dems?? I think they do
23 states have a clear majority of repubs. That may mean some that are close (one or two reps different) may have a tough battle of how to split. There are five or six of those
Plus the newly elected house must be seated in January before Inauguration Day. The new house may look even better
“America is at that awkward stage; it's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.” ...Larry, since we know that this is the Communist insurrection Khrushchev shouted about at the UN podium when he said "We will bury you!" Well guess what? Nobody in the Soviet Politburo told them to cancel the attack on the United States just because the Soviet Union fell.
The Soviet defector, Yuri Bezmenov, warned us about it in 1984.
Then further substantiated by this Paul Weyrich Quote:
"I asked [Yegor] Gaidar why it was that he thought free-market efforts in the Soviet Union were being trashed by American media when the reality was far different from what I was seeing. He replied with a stinging answer, one I never will forget. He said, 'Well, the Soviets spent millions of dollars infiltrating your media. Just because the Soviet Union went away doesn't mean these people have gone away. They are still there.' Of course, I knew this."Could this be time to go look up Clare Wolfe and see if she imagined what circumstances would take us to the next stage?[Yegor Gaidar was the acting Prime Minister of Russia appointed by President Boris Yeltsin from 15 June 1992 to 14 December 1992, but was not confirmed by the anti-Yeltsin Russian Congress of People's Deputies.]