fake trump electors would be on record to put the election in trump s favor. mike lee, a few days after the election, mike lee writes tomatoes, white house chief of staff at the time, quote, it s a small handful of states were to have their legislatures appoint alternative slates of delegates, there could be a path. a month later he discusses his concerns about the way his senate colleagues have gone about examining the results. he wants to know that his electoral scheme has a much better shot of success. i ll think, he says, that this could all backfire badly unless we have legislators submitting trump slates. later, he says again, we need something from state legislators to make this legitimate to have any hope of winning. even if they cannot convene, it may indicating how they would vote. and i have been working on doing that all day today. here is why this matters so much right now. the fake electors scheme is a play that republicans could very likely try to run again to
someone no less than the president of the united states. they acted under color of law to steal the right to vote from the american people. and i think this is so significant, nicole, because of all the things that we have to think about with respect to january 6th, there are ways to harden the gates, harden the doors, harden the glass, arm the capitol police, but if we re going to harden our laws, we have to engage in legal reform because under the electoral count act, under our constitutional system, the house of representatives can decide an election if there aren t 270 electoral votes that are given to anybody. so, all the republicans need to do is basically steal the slate of electors right out from under state legislators that would be sending them to washington, convince them to sent alternative slates or convince people to engage in other shenanigans and if they don t do it by the deadline, nobody gets 270, the house of representatives decides and that is whoever controls the h
the contemporary united states he s founder of a election law blog and a professor at the university of irvine and he joins me now rick, you have been very, very focused on this. i share your concern and focus on it and we ve been pretty focused on it. first, have you gotten more or less concerned as time has passed between january 6th particularly and now well, i ve gotten much more concerned. first of all, we ve learned a lot more about what happened behind the scenes january 6th. we learned how vice president pence was urged to essentially just declare trump the winner based on a false claim there were seven states with alternative slates of electors because of irregularities in elections. none of the stuff was true, but vice president pence stood up. raffensperger stood up people who were actually in power and who had to make decisions stood up and we were able to withstand what trump was