Fourteen presidential electors linked to efforts to reverse former President Donald Trump’s 2020 defeat are currently back on their states’ Republican slates of representatives to the Electoral College for the 2024 election.
Four years ago, what have been known as “fake electors” gathered in seven mainly swing states where Trump lost the popular vote to sign certificates that became part of a scheme by the former president and his allies to try to overturn the election results.
This year’s return of some of these Republicans as potential electors — confirmed in recent weeks through party filings to state election officials — raises questions about what they will do if Trump loses in their states again. The GOP nominee, who is facing four felony counts related to leading conspiracies to reverse the 2020 results and disenfranchise millions of voters, has refused to commit to unconditionally accepting the results of the upcoming 2024 election while continuing to repeat the lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him.
The returning Republican electors are:
- Michigan: Amy Facchinello, Hank Choate, John Haggard, Marian Sheridan, Meshawn Maddock, Timothy King
- Nevada: Jesse Law, Michael McDonald
- New Mexico: Deborah Maestas
- Pennsylvania: Andy Reilly, Ash Khare, Bernadette Comfort, Bill Bachenberg, Patricia Poprick
Political parties in Wisconsin, another state that had unauthorized Republican electors, are not expected to select their potential 2024 electors until October, and a legal settlement bars those unauthorized 2020 electors from backing Trump again. And there are no repeat pro-Trump electors from 2020 on this year’s Republican slates for Arizona and Georgia.
Many legal experts say that changes to the federal law governing the counting of electoral votes in Congress, as well as criminal and civil charges filed against some of the pro-Trump electors for what they did in 2020, are likely to deter them from taking part in similar efforts this year.
Still, some election watchers are concerned that electors connected with a push to overturn election results have another opportunity to represent one of the country’s two major political parties in a key process for the transfer of power in U.S. democracy.
Who these returning pro-Trump electors are
Many of these returning pro-Trump electors are current or former state and local GOP leaders, including McDonald, the Nevada Republican chair.
“The decision over who the electors are is a decision made by the political parties, and those are usually party faithful,” says Rebecca Green, an associate professor specializing in election law at William & Mary Law School. “You are picking people who you want to cast their ballots for the party's nominee. That's how our system works.”
The Electoral College system was tested, however, in 2020 when Republican electors in several states where Trump lost the popular vote sent false certificates to Congress claiming that Trump had won their states’ electoral votes, which determine the winner of presidential races.
Criminal charges have been filed against electors in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Nevada by prosecutor’s offices led by Democrats, although a state judge in Nevada threw out an indictment against six GOP electors in June, saying the state chose the wrong venue for the case.
Most of the returning pro-Trump electors did not respond to NPR’s multiple requests for comment or declined to comment.
David Kallman is an attorney for one of Michigan’s 2020 pro-Trump electors, Choate, who is returning in 2024 as a potential Republican elector while facing eight felony counts, including conspiracy to commit forgery. Choate and other charged GOP electors have pleaded not guilty, and Kallman says they were relying on legal advice from GOP attorneys when they signed the second page of the certificate without reading the first, which states that for the 2020 election, they are the “duly elected and qualified Electors for President and Vice President of the United States of America from the State of Michigan.”
“Should these electors have read the documents and all of that? I'm not going to disagree with that,” Kallman says. “But the reality is that's not what they're charged with. They're charged with a crime for having intent knowingly to defraud, you know, to intentionally lie and do a false document. That is clearly not true.”
Kallman says he does not expect a ruling in the case against the Michigan GOP electors until next year, leaving open the possibility that Choate is called to serve as an official 2024 elector while still under an indictment, if Michigan’s governor certifies Trump as the state’s winner.
“If it's certified that [Vice President] Harris won and there's another attempt to try to get the electors to sign something, you can bet I will be involved in that and will be giving appropriate advice and counsel to my client. I'll just leave it at that,” Kallman adds.
In Pennsylvania and New Mexico, however, no pro-Trump electors from 2020 have been charged.
In an email to NPR, the press office for Pennsylvania’s state attorney general says there are no changes to their position on what the electors did as laid out in a 2022 statement to LancasterOnline. “These ‘fake ballots’ included a conditional clause that they were only to be used if a court overturned the results in Pennsylvania, which did not happen,” the statement said. “Though their rhetoric and policy were intentionally misleading and purposefully damaging to our democracy, based on our initial review, our office does not believe this meets the legal standards for forgery.”
New Mexico’s pro-Trump electors included a similar conditional clause.
Ash Khare, one of Pennsylvania’s returning pro-Trump electors, says he does not consider himself a “fake elector” but instead a “genuine patriot that did the right thing,” citing an ongoing legal fight at the time over Pennsylvania’s ballots that many legal experts saw to be going nowhere.
“We would not be wise guys,” Khare says. “We were just trying to cover the bases in case the decision goes the other way.”
Asked for his reaction when first hearing about the charges against pro-Trump electors in other states, Khare says with a laugh: “What crossed our mind is that we were smart. They screwed up. They should have put the same caveat in like we did.”
Another signer of the Pennsylvania certificate — Andy Reilly, the Republican national committeeman for the state — says he wanted to serve again as a potential elector this year “because I know sometimes in the heat of a campaign, people can get fervent and they can cross the line.”
“I'm going to make sure that we do everything to preserve, if it's legal, the rights of the candidate, but without doing anything that I think would violate the law or the Constitution, like I did the last time,” adds Reilly, an attorney.
Why the 2024 election is different from the 2020 election (and why it’s not)
Electors this year are entering a different environment than in 2020, Green of William & Mary Law School says, after the federal Electoral Count Reform Act was signed into law in 2022.
A lot of the “holes” in the earlier process — including no definitions of the state executive who is required to certify who is appointed to be the state’s electors — have now been plugged, Green adds.
And the charges against some unauthorized pro-Trump electors are still looming.
“Given that there have been prosecutions of electors for forgery and conspiracy, I would think that people in that position would think twice about serving as an elector and holding sort of an unofficial Electoral College meeting, unless there is significant ongoing litigation suggesting that there's sort of an indeterminate outcome,” Green says.
Mary McCord, a former Justice Department official who is now the executive director of Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, helped bring a civil lawsuit against 2020 pro-Trump electors in Wisconsin, where a settlement agreement now bans those electors from serving again in any U.S. presidential election with Trump on the ballot.
While McCord agrees that it will likely be more difficult for pro-Trump electors to try to carry out similar efforts this year if Trump loses, she warns that persistent disinformation about elections and their results could still fuel another attempt.
The Electoral Count Reform Act “certainly raises the bar” by requiring one-fifth of both the U.S. House and Senate to object to a state’s electoral votes, instead of the one representative and one senator previously required, McCord notes. “But it's not an impossible threshold to meet, particularly if there's a false narrative that's out there that in a particular state there was fraud in the election.”
Edited by Benjamin Swasey
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