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It’s fucking bullshit. No one was defrauded. No one was deceived. This slate was claiming there was election fraud and therefore they were the true electors; not that the state actually authorized them.
It was a shitty legal theory acting out a political claim; that isn’t illegal and trying to shoehorn this into fraud or disruption of an official event is disgusting.
No, take Michigan for example. The Board of State Canvassers certified the 16 electoral votes for Biden on November 23. Per the Michigan Constitution, "the certification of any election results by the board of state canvassers shall be final subject only to (a) a post-certification recount of the votes cast in that election supervised by the board of state canvassers under procedures prescribed by law; or (b) a post-certification court order."
Despite this, on December 14, sixteen people got together in the Michigan capitol building, signed a document (alleged to have been provided by the Trump administration) stating that they were the "duly elected and qualified Electors for President and Vice President of the United States of America from the State of Michigan". and that the state had 16 votes for Trump. They then mailed this document to the United States "per 3 U.S.C. § 11" in an envelope labeled "Electoral Votes of the State of Michigan for President and Vice President of The United States".
I guess that's totally fine though because they forgot to attach the certificate of ascertainment of appointment of electors. It's not like anyone in Washington was looking for an excuse to ignore the legitimately certified votes and replace them with a sham or anything.
Despite the fact that we said we won, you said we didn't win. That's fraud!
Your definitions have made a certain kind of political dissent a priori criminal. But our rights don't descend from the Constitution, they descent from nature, and it cannot be a crime to contest the political process.
Isn't the whole point of the argument that they were not official electors because they didn't participate in a legal proceeding? That they had to mail their ballots in? I think you're just making up whatever rationalization makes the charging document make sense.
Which of course further underscores the silliness of this all. If the alternative electors had put a caveat in, then no crime. Some of them did of course.
Yet because some didn’t, now Trump is guilty of defrauding the government? Really?
Yes, really. If you do one thing it's a crime, but if you do a subtly different thing it's not a crime. These distinctions exist everywhere.
If you drive through an intersection when the light is green, it's legal. If you drive through the exact same intersection 30 seconds later when the light is red, it's a crime.
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