A scenario they could never have imagined.
When the English arrived in Australia, they discovered tribesmen using curved pieces of wood that they called “bou-mar-rangs” or “boomerangs” which fly away and come back at you.
Politics has lots of boomerangs. The latest throwing stick to fly out and come circling back when least expected was a Democrat conspiracy aimed at keeping Trump out of the White House.
A year earlier, Hamilton’s awkward ahistorical rapping had swept elites from Manhattan to D.C. and the “Hamilton Electors” came up with their own unmusical scheme to rig the 2016 election.
After Trump won and Hillary lost, the Hamilton Electors tried to find Republican “faithless electors” to block Trump’s certification by backing a fake Republican like Colin Powell. While Hamilton went on touring the country and then became a movie, the Hamilton election rigging scheme didn’t do so well with only a handful of mostly Dem electors casting votes for Colin Powell (3), Bernie Sanders (2) Ron Paul (1) and Native American activists Faith Spotted Eagle (1) and Elizabeth Warren (1). This wasn’t nearly enough to throw the election to the House to recreate the scheme Aaron Burr.(as described in my book, not the musical) tried to pull in 1800.
Had Republicans tried any such thing, the electors involved would have spent the rest of their lives battling it out in local and federal courts, and their lawyers (in this case Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig) would have been disbarred and then prosecuted under laws last used after the Civil War. But “creative election challenges” are in the “finest legal tradition” when done by leftists, but a “threat to democracy” when engaged in by conservatives.
While the scheme was an election failure, it did lead to a Supreme Court case (Chiafalo v. Washington) testing whether states can force electors to vote for the pledged candidate.
And that might be a big problem.
States like Washington and Colorado cracked down on “faithless electors” but if Biden wins the election and becomes officially non-compos mentis, the faithless might be the party’s only hope.
The Democrats are mired in a crisis of their own making when after rigging the primaries for Biden they discovered that his brain might not be fully rigged, but that throwing him off the ballot may be unworkable. Even if Biden remains the nominee and wins, and then plops, there’s no mechanism for many electors voting for anyone else and that makes for a very split ticket.
Democrat electors would have a choice of selecting a dead (or brain dead) man or nothing.
The status of electors was somewhat ambiguous despite the precedent set back in 1952 with
Ray v. Blair and Chiafalo v. Washington reasserted it on the worst possible terms. Despite Lessig’s representation, the faithless elector case was pathetically weak and appeared unclear as to whether it was aimed at undermining the 2016 election, the Electoral College or both. --->READ MORE HERE
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