“Donald Trump may be crazy, but he’s not stupid. When he claims that ‘nobody’ showed up at a 10,000 person Harris-Walz rally in Michigan that was live-streamed and widely covered by the media, that it was all AI, and that Democrats cheat all of the time, there is a method to his madness,” Sanders said in a statement.
“Clearly, and dangerously, what Trump is doing is laying the groundwork for rejecting the election results if he loses,” he added. “If you can convince your supporters that thousands of people who attended a televised rally do not exist, it will not be hard to convince them that the election returns in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and elsewhere are ‘fake’ and ‘fraudulent.’”
[…]
“This is what destroying faith in institutions is about. This is what undermining democracy is about. This is what fascism is about,” he said of Trump’s campaign falsehoods. “This is why we must do everything we can to see that Trump is defeated.”
I think one idea this time is to have enough states not certify the results to force a vote for president where each state gets a single vote. Since there are more Republican states they vote in Trump. Not sure what safeguards there are against states that decide not to certify even if they don’t have proof, or what role courts play in that scenario.
The thing is, that was the plan in 2020, and the reason it didn’t happen was because Pence was supposed to refuse to count the electoral college due to the “confusion” caused by the fake electors. He’d then call for the “1 vote per state” sham. Now, Kamala Harris is in charge of that process.
I thought states needed to certify before it got to Congress? This would be not sending any results period so the VP isn’t involved yet. Least that’s my understanding.
Well there’s nothing in the constitution or law that says “if the electoral college is too gunked up to work, we go to a single vote per state.” The Electoral Count Act of 1887 lays out rules for how it’s supposed to be done. The plan in 2020 was for Mike Pence to claim the ECA was unconstitutional and throw it to a 1 vote per state assembly, since the extra (fake) electors from some states were muddying the waters. He didn’t do it because his lawyers and advisors convinced him that he didn’t have that power under the law.
I’m no expert, but it seems like best they can do by refusing to certify at the state level is probably just to slow things down. There’s really no viable way that gumming up the works will end with Trump in the White House without having actually won.
According to Wikipedia a candidate needs 270 electoral votes to win, if no one gets 270 votes then it goes to the other vote. All I’m saying is one avenue I’ve read about is they are trying to have enough people in place to ensure the Democratic candidate can’t get the electoral votes to win to force the house to vote by not certifying their states’s results.
I’m not saying it’s likely or possible, that’s beyond my knowledge of the process so I really have no clue, but that’s slightly different than the VP not certifying the votes though it’s the same end result.