Donald Trump: How The US President Can Try To Hold On To Power

With court cases faltering, the Trump campaign has thrown a big clue as to what his next tactic is to win the election. It is undemocratic, but completely legal, writes Benedict Brook.

A tweet from an attorney representing US President Donald Trump has sparked fears that the commander-in-chief may try to hold onto power, basically ignoring the counted election results.

Jenna Ellis, who in the past called the president an “idiot” and claimed his followers don’t care about “facts or logic,” is now firmly on Trump’s team.

Last week, he posted on social media that in Michigan, a state that leaned toward Democrats, the legislature could decide to “select the voters.”

He added that it was a “great victory for Trump.”

This would mean the 16 Michigan Electoral College votes allocated in accordance with the wishes of the state’s Republican majority legislature, the equivalent of a state parliament, rather than the voters who have reportedly chosen the Democratic candidate. Joe Biden. Trump has reportedly invited some Republican politicians from Michigan to the White House to discuss exactly this course of action.

Critics have called a strategy to ignore the popular vote in enough states to allow Trump to remain in the White House a “fever dream.”

A prominent law professor has said it would be nothing more than a “naked power play” and could lead to a conflict on the streets.

But the United States Constitution, which gave the country its complicated electoral system, is ambiguous about it. Certainly, it seems possible that the politicians of a state simply put aside the wishes of the voters.

“The president can ask Republican-controlled state legislatures to assign electoral votes to him,” the website reported. Blackboard.

“This maneuver would constitute a terrible assault on democracy. But it would be legal.”

PLAN TO TURN THE STATES BIDEN WON

In early 2020, when the coronavirus was on the radar, some election experts had speculated that Trump might attempt to remove the link between voters and the Electoral College.

The theory was far-fetched and was thought to only likely if the pandemic had gotten so out of control that states could be persuaded to stop voting for the elections.

But since the presidential election was projected for Biden, the strategy has started to appear as a possible way for Trump to stay in office.

Ellis’s tweet almost confirmed that the Electoral College takeover was now in Trump’s toolbox.

His comments followed a chaotic canvassing board meeting in Detroit, Michigan’s largest city, on Wednesday.

The board was in charge of reviewing and certifying the results of the city to add them to the official total of the state. Preliminary counts showed that Biden had received 50.6 percent of the vote and would get all 16 votes from Michigan.

By December 8, all states must have resolved any voting controversies and elected their constituents to the Electoral College.

The two Republican pollsters initially refused to certify the results, with one declaring that some districts were “out of balance,” the Associated Press reported.

The tellers later did certify, but prior to that, Ms. Ellis stated that if the state board did not similarly certify the result, the state legislature would have to make the decision to decide its constituents for the Electoral College.

As a Republican majority, it is presumed that voters appointed by the Michigan legislature would elect Trump when they vote on December 14.

Michigan going to Trump would not change the election. But if multiple states did the same, the game could begin.

TOTALLY LEGAL, BUT RARE

At this point, it’s probably wise to remind ourselves of how the Electoral College, that uniquely American electoral beast, works.

By now, we probably all know that American elections are not directly decided by actual voters.

Rather, it is the 538 electors of the Electoral College who decide who wins. If 270 fat for a candidate, they are inside.

The 538 voters are divided by state according to the size of the population.

When they vote, they choose the candidate chosen by the majority of the voters in their state.

That is the accepted way the Electoral College works. But it doesn’t have to happen that way.

The Constitution of the United States states that “each state shall appoint” its electors “in the manner that the legislature may order.

But nowhere does it say that those voters have to be appointed in a way that reflects the popular vote.

It’s not just a theory, it’s happened before. In the first presidential election in 1788 several states, which did not have popular votes, appointed their electors.

The Supreme Court has also reiterated that the Constitution allows legislatures to “regain the power to appoint voters.”

Earlier this year, when the possibility was raised in an article in The Atlantic magazine, the Trump campaign called the very idea “false and ridiculous.”

But Ms. Ellis’s tweet suggests that they have come up with the idea.

One strategy of the president’s team could be to sow so much confusion and doubt in the results, albeit little in the background, and to exert so much pressure on the Republican majority legislatures that they feel compelled to decide the Electoral College votes. themselves.

“State legislatures will say, ‘Okay, we’ve been given this constitutional power. We don’t think our state’s results are accurate, so here is our list of voters that we believe adequately reflects our state’s results.’ A Trump campaign informant is reported to have told The Atlantic earlier in the year.

‘NAKED POWER POLICY’

University of California Irvine law and political science professor Richard Hassen said that in practice there was less room for maneuver to ignore the outcome of the election.

“The Constitution gives state legislatures the right to establish the way to elect presidential electors, but they have already established the way: the use of popular election to assign votes to the Electoral College on the basis of the winner taking it everything, “he told The Atlantic. .

“In theory, state legislatures could attempt to declare under part of the Voter Counting Act that voters have not ‘failed’ to make an election for president, which gives the legislature the right to choose electors. But voters have made a choice, and there is no argument that fraud or wrongdoing infected that choice.

“For state legislatures to do this, we are outside the realm of legal arguments and naked power politics, where the election of the president would be challenged in Congress.”

Since no state has appointed voters since 1788, doing so now “would cause massive unrest,” he added.

Several states that leaned toward Democrats have signaled that they will not change the way electoral college voters are named.

In October, before the election was called, the leaders of Pennsylvania’s two houses of parliament issued a joint statement saying that the legislature “does not have and will not participate in the election of the state’s presidential electors.”

More recently, officials in Wisconsin and Arizona have also said they don’t expect to overturn centuries of convention and appoint voters directly.

But there are caveats. Rusty Bowers, the Republican speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, told US broadcaster ABC that there was “no serious way” to change the way voters were named “unless some sort of fraud was found.”

It appears that Trump’s legal team, like Ellis, will go to great lengths to show that there is fraud, or at least the appearance of fraud, to bring this unlikely scenario closer to the realm of reality.