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This is patently absurd. We shouldn’t be searching and contorting rules to criminalize political questions. It isn’t something that is down the fairway (eg tax fraud, bribery).
By the way, the obstruction charge related to the documents is a legit charge.
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.
It sounds like you believe that technicalities and penumbras are the law. Two slates of electors submit alternate ballots, but one included the magic hypothetical phrase, so they didn't do anything; the other slate didn't, so they did. Do you have any principles or something? Do you think this is a crime or not? This isn't law, it's legalism. And the legal process is controlled by a political class that respects power, not law.
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