A senior Republican Party official in Georgia confirms that an “alternative” slate of Trump Electors are voting today in Atlanta

A senior Republican Party official in Georgia confirmed that an alternative slate of Electoral College Electors are voting today to re-elect President Donald J. Trump in defiance of the disputed 2020 election result.

“It’s definitely happening. It’s not a secret. The campaign is up there doing this right now … One of the electors is a good friend of mine, and she’s up there right now in Atlanta.”

The Republican slate for the Electoral College are going to claim that they were legitimately elected and the plan is for them to make their vote for President Trump and send it to Congress. From there, Congress will have to sort the discrepancy between the states’ certifications of their election results and the votes of the alternate slate.

The senior party official remarked at the historic nature of the decision, “This is the first time since 1876 that a state has had two different slates of conflicting electors.”

This refers to the 1876 presidential election where disputed election results in Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina and Oregon prompted a congressional compromise which saw the Republicans keep the White House in exchange for concessions to Democrats.

Miller’s initial announcement on Fox & Friends explained the constitutional and legal rationale behind the alternate slate.

The only date in the Constitution is January 20th, so we have more than enough time to right the wrong of this fraudulent election result and certify Donald Trump as the winner of this election.

As we speak today, an alternate slate of electors in the contested states is going to vote and we’re going to send those results up to Congress.

ALL of our legal remedies remain open. That means that if we win these cases in the courts that we can direct that the alternate slate of electors be certified. The state legislatures in Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania can do the same. And likewise Congress has that opportunity as well to do the right thing.

A white paper from top lawyers at the Amistad Project demonstrated that the Electoral College deadlines of December 8th and 14th are negotiable at best and meaningless at worst.

Miller then went into further detail about the pending litigation over the 2020 election and explained how even fairly modest anti-fraud efforts now could easily flip the result:

If you just cured three simple constitutional defects, Donald Trump’s the winner of this election. Whether it’s the signature matching in Georgia that was illegally changed as a result of the Consent Decree without the legislature’s approval; or whether it’s the hundreds of thousands of improperly-cast ballots in Wisconsin – absentee voters who never actually submitted the requests for absentee ballots; or whether you’re talking about Pennsylvania, the clear Equal Protection violation when Democrat ballots were cured in advance of Election Day and Republican ballots weren’t.

These are just three of hundreds of violations that we’ve documented and those three violations alone make Donald Trump the winner of the 2020 election.

It is unclear how this will impact the impending run-off election for Georgia’s two U.S. Senate seats. As it stands, there there are 50 Republicans versus 48 Democrats elected to the Senate, so a double Democrat victory would create a 50-50 split with the next Vice President voting as a tie-breaker.

“He may never concede; he doesn’t have to concede,” Yoo said. “The thing about the American Constitution is that it doesn’t actually require the sitting president to do anything one way or the other. On January 20th, Donald Trump’s term ends and Joe Biden’s, I believe, will begin.”

Forensic Report of Dominion Voting machines alleges fraud; intentionally high error rate; deletion of data

DATED: DECEMBER 14, 2020 BY SHARYL ATTKISSON 

• Report released by Michigan court today
• Dominion software said to have an incredibly high 68% error rate, “by design”
• 2020 election data illegally deleted on Nov. 4, according to the Plaintiff’s forensic report
• Plaintiff’s attorney claims the forensics exam proves fraud, which Dominion and Antrim County, Michigan officials deny
• Plaintiff’s attorney says the forensics explain the mysterious 6,000 vote “accident” in Antrim County, in which Biden was incorrectly declared the winner until a correction showed Trump actually won

A constitutional lawyer representing a Michigan Antrim County voter has released what he calls an “explosive” forensics exam of two Dominion voting machines.

It is the first known forensics exam of machines used in the disputed 2020 election where Republican Donald Trump claims to have had the race stolen by Democrat Joe Biden through widespread fraud.

Biden, his supporters, most of the media, and many officials say the claims of having the election “stolen” are spurious and without evidence. 

Read the forensics report here

Hundreds of people claim to have witnessed election day improprieties ranging from sloppiness and unintentional errors to outright fraud. Some of them have testified before hearings and filed sworn declarations.

A Michigan judge cleared the way for the release of the forensics report today.

Constitutional attorney Matthew DePerno represents resident William Bailey in the court challenge that claims Bailey’s vote was not proven to have been counted in the 2020 presidential election due to improprieties or fraud.

As part of the case, the judge allowed DePerno’s forensic team to examine two Antrim County Dominion Voting machines.

Among the findings, according to the report released today, somebody improperly deleted the 2020 election data, which is required by law to be maintained.

An examination of the software used in the election, according to the forensic report, shows that it was intentionally designed with vulnerabilities that open it up for potential fraud.

The error rate of the voting machines is allowed to be no more than fractional, under federal law. However, DePerno says the software in the Dominion machines showed that a 68% error rate was built into them.
That means 68 out of every 100 votes would be sent to what he calls an unsupervised process for “adjudication.” That’s where he say an official, unmonitored, would have the ability to change votes or assign them to the opposing candidate.

DePerno claims the report proves fraud in the election and has implications far beyond Antrim County.

Antrim County had an unusual election snafu where Biden was declared the winner until some residents in the reliably Republican county raised red flags. Ultimately, it was learned that Trump actually won the county. Conflicting explanations have been given for the mistaken results. Antrim officials first stated that a software issue had caused a glitch. Later, other officials claimed it was human error and not machine related (nor nefarious). When asked why one county election official had first blamed a software problem, a state investigator said he did not know.

DePerno says the forensic report explains the chaos in Antrim County.
Those accused in the improprieties deny having done anything wrong.  Michigan Elections Director Jonathan Brater filed a statement with the court claiming the forensic report by the Plaintiffs “makes a series of unsupported conclusions, ascribes motives of fraud and obfuscation to processes that are easily explained as routine election procedures or error corrections, and suggests without explanation that elements of election software not used in Michigan are somehow responsible for tabulation or reporting errors that are either nonexistent or easily explained.”
Dominion Voting Systems has also steadfastly denied the widespread allegations of improprieties or fraud.

Dominion’s position on all allegations can be found here: https://www.dominionvoting.com/election2020-setting-the-record-straight/

How the 12th Amendment works

States allow the popular vote to determine the appointment of electors, but Trump and his allies could use friendly state legislatures and governors to send alternate—or in the case of states with Republican legislatures and Democratic governors, additional—electors. When the electoral college convenes on Dec. 14, states with competing electors would cast double their allotted votes, forcing Senate president Mike Pence to figure out what to do with the doubled-up votes. If Pence threw out the extra votes and neither candidate hit 270, the decision goes to the House. There, each state delegation gets one vote; currently, in 27 states, a majority of delegates are Republican.

(For a trip down memory lane: Back in 2000, Florida’s Republican legislature was on the cusp of appointing new electors to vote for Bush as the court-ordered recount dragged on. The SCOTUS decision rendered that preparation moot. Also, in 1876, states sent competing electoral college delegations and after Congress failed for months to agree on which was valid, a last-minute deal was struck that made Rutherford B. Hayes president as long as he agreed to end Reconstruction.)

And from TheConversation.com:

Congress will open and record the votes of the Electoral College in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021. But this time when, as per the 12th amendment of the US Constitution, “the President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates,” the procedure may not be a simple formality. Because each house is controlled by a different party, each may approve their own list, or both houses may reject the electors from some states. The legal framework is so vague that no one outcome can be certain.

In case of a tie, the 12th Amendment states that “the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President” and that “the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote”. As things stand, this method of adding up state representations rather that the individual votes of the 435 representatives would give the Republicans a majority to reelect their candidate. But everything hinges on the elections in the House and Senate, also on November 3, since the final decision would be up to the members of the new Congress, to be installed on January 3, 2021. Incidentally, the current Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, is an unparalleled strategist who has already mapped the districts the Democrats must win on November 3 in order to have not only a seat majority but also a majority of blue states in the House of Representatives.

Here is even more on the history and working of the 12th Amendment, from the ConstitutionCenter.org:

The Twelfth Amendment cannot be understood outside of the Electoral College, which was set out in the 1787 Constitution as the mechanism by which Americans select their presidents.

There were four crucial aspects of that mechanism. The first was that the electors would vote for two persons (at least one of whom had to be from outside the elector’s home state). The second was that the electors did not differentiate between the two persons as potential presidents or vice presidents. Electors should simply vote for the two persons they viewed as most qualified to become president. The person gaining the most votes (if a majority) would become president. The runner-up (presumably the second-most-qualified person) would become vice president. The third assumption was that the electors—at least following the completely predictable (and unanimous) election of George Washington as our first president—would quite often fail to reach majority approval of a specific candidate; in that case, according to the original Constitution, the decision would be made by the House of Representatives, with each state’s delegation having one vote. The Constitution also provided that the House would choose in case of a tie vote between two candidates each of whom had received a majority of votes. Finally, because the Constitution, until amended in 1933, provided that newly elected representatives would meet for the first time only a full year after election, the choice would be made by a House that would likely include a number of “lame-ducks,” including representatives who had been defeated in the recent elections. All of these features were on display in 1801.about:blankabout:blank

The election of 1800 was one of the most important in American history and, arguably, even in world history, for it represented the first time that an incumbent leader was defeated in an election. The incumbent was John Adams, who had been Washington’s Vice President for two terms and was then elected in his own right in 1796. His Vice President was Thomas Jefferson. This result reflects the desire of the Framers of 1787 to avoid development of political parties and focus indeed on some notion of “best men.” Any such hopes were quickly frustrated, however. Even by 1796, Adams was associated with the Federalist Party, while Jefferson was supported by the Democratic-Republican Party. They ran against each other again in 1800, and both Adams and Jefferson had “running mates,” Charles Cotesworth Pinckney from South Carolina in the case of Adams (and the Federalist Party) and Aaron Burr of New York, for Jefferson. The Federalist Party electors figured out that it was important not to cast both of their votes for Adams and Pinckney, for that would create a tie and, if both got a majority of the vote, throw the election into the House; the Democratic-Republican electors were not so sagacious. They dutifully cast both of their votes for their party’s champions, creating a tie majority vote that forced the House to choose between Jefferson and Burr.

The tie vote exposed deep problems in the 1787 system. The one-state/one-vote rule had the practical effect of giving Delaware’s sole Representative Bayard, an ardent Federalist, the same voting power as Virginia, then the largest state (and home, of course, of Jefferson). And what if a state had an even number of representatives who split evening on their choice? In that case, the state’s vote was not cast at all. Given that there were 16 states in the Union in 1801, nine delegations had to agree on their choice. Only on the 36th ballot did Bayard agree to vote for Jefferson and to break the deadlock (by which time at least two Jeffersonian governors, from Pennsylvania and Virginia, were threatening to call out their state militias and order them to march on the new national capitol in Washington, D.C.). Jefferson was peacefully inaugurated on March 4, and the all-important precedent was set for peaceful transfer of power. Yet the original electoral college system was exposed as problematic, and there was widespread agreement that something had to be done. But what?

One possibility, obviously, was to adopt the suggestion of Pennsylvania’s James Wilson at the Philadelphia Convention that presidents be elected by a national popular vote. That was rejected in 1787 and did not become a serious possibility in the early 19th century (nor, of course, has it been adopted since then). Still, it had become clear that political parties had become a feature of American politics and that the electoral college system should be modified to reflect this. How was this accomplished?

The answer is quite simple: electors would in the future continue to cast two votes (and one of them, as before, would have to be for a non-native of the elector’s home state), but, crucially, one of the two votes would explicitly be to fill the presidency, while the other designated who should become vice president. Never again could presidential candidates and their running mates face the embarrassing kind of tie vote that forced the House to choose between Jefferson and Burr. The Twelfth Amendment was proposed by the Eighth Congress on December 9, 1803 and submitted to the states three days later. There being seventeen states in the Union at that time, thirteen had to ratify it. Secretary of State James Madison declared that the Amendment had been added to the Constitution on September 25, 1804, at which time fourteen of the seventeen states had ratified it. Delaware, Connecticut, and Massachusetts had rejected it (though Massachusetts in fact ratified it in 1961!). The election of 1804 and all subsequent elections were carried out under the terms of the Twelfth Amendment.

This splitting of the presidency and vice-presidency did not go uncontested. At least two senators expressed their reservations about the quality of vice presidential candidates. Rather than asking of a candidate “Is he capable? Is he honest?”, Delaware’s Senator White suggested that the question instead would be “Can he by his name, by his connections, by his wealth, by his local situation, by his influence, or his intrigues, best promote the election of a President?” Senator Tracy of Connecticut agreed: “Will the ambitious, aspiring candidate for the Presidency, will his friends and favorites promote the election of a man of talents, probity and popularity for Vice President, and who may prove his rival? No! They will seek a man of moderate talents.” One might well ask how often such fears have been realized in our history.

In addition to its implicit recognition of the existence of political parties, the Amendment made another important change: The original Constitution provided that the failure of any candidate to achieve a majority would require the House to choose as president one of the five top-ranking candidates, with the person coming in second to serve as vice-president unless there was tie for second place, in which case the Senate would choose between them. Now, however, the House would choose only the President from the top three choices of the electors; the Senate would now choose the Vice President from the top two choices of the electors for that specific office. Among other things, this guaranteed, in effect, that there would always be a vice president, who could presumably take the reins of the presidency should the House be hopelessly divided among the top three candidates for the presidency.

This aspect of the Twelfth Amendment became crucial in 1824, the only time since 1800 that the House in fact selected the president as the result of the inability of any of the presidential candidates to achieve a majority of electoral votes. Andrew Jackson had won 99, John Quincy Adams 84, William Crawford 41, and Henry Clay 37. Under the original Constitution, the House would have been able to choose among all four, and one might plausibly believe that Clay might have prevailed. Under the Twelfth Amendment, however, Clay was out of the running, and the choice was reduced to Jackson, Adams, and Crawford.

Although no election since 1824 has been decided in the House of Representatives, a shift of relatively few votes in a small number of key states might well have led to that result in 1948, 1968, and 2000. What this means, practically speaking, is that in contemporary America, Wyoming, the smallest state with under 600,000 people, would have the same say in choosing a new president as California, with a population nearly 70 times that of Wyoming. As much to the point, perhaps, it is quite easy to imagine the popular vote winner losing to the runner-up in part because gerrymandered delegations in the House of Representatives voted for their party’s favorite rather than the person who actually received a majority of their state’s popular vote.

Because of the potential disconnect between the popular vote and the result of the electoral vote (or potential vote in the House), there have been recurrent proposals simply to elect the president by popular vote. If, though, one shares any of White’s or Tracy’s concerns about the vice presidency, popular election would not necessarily assuage them if one were forced to vote for the president and vice-president as a single ticket. (Political scientists have determined that voters rarely cast their vote on the basis of the vice presidential candidate.)about:blankabout:blank

One possible reform is to adopt the practice in many states and “unbundle” the election of our two top executive branch officials. That is, just as in many states candidates for governor and lieutenant governor run entirely separate campaigns, meaning that sometimes the governor is from one party and the lieutenant governor from another, one could imagine separate elections for the president and vice president. Even within the electoral college, we could imagine voting for two slates of electors, one charged with choosing the president, the other picking the vice president. Most of the time, of course, voters would pick the slates of the same political party. But one can imagine that at least on occasion voters might be so put off by the vice presidential candidate that they would “split” their ticket. That very possibility might serve to discipline presidential candidates more than is now the case, especially because candidates who win the presidential nomination today basically exercise unlimited discretion in choosing their running mates. This was not the case before the 20th century, when political conventions often exercised real choice in picking both candidates.