Michael McDonald, chairman of the Nevada Republican Party, shakes hands with former President Donald Trump at a January event for Trump’s re-election campaign in Las Vegas. McDonald is one of 14 presidential electors this year involved in efforts to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss.
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John Locher/AP
Fourteen presidential electors involved in the effort to overturn former President Donald Trump’s 2020 defeat are now returning to the Republican Party’s slate of representatives in their states. Electoral College for the 2024 election.
Four years ago, so-called “fake electors” gathered in seven key swing states where Trump lost the popular vote to sign certificates as part of a plot by the former president and his allies to overturn the election results.
The return of some of these Republicans as potential voters this year — confirmed in recent weeks through party filings with state election officials — raises questions about what they will do if Trump loses again in their states. The GOP nominee, who facing four felony charges involved in leading plots to overturn the 2020 results and disenfranchise millions of voters, has refuse to commit unconditionally accept the results of the upcoming 2024 elections while keep repeating the lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him.
The returning Republican electors are:
- Michigan: Amy Facchinello, Hank Choate, John Haggard, Marian Sheridan, Meshawn Maddock, Timothy King
- Nevada: Jesse Law, Michael McDonald
- New Mexico: Deborah Maestas
- Pennsylvania: Andy Reilly, Ash Khare, Bernadette Comfort, Bill Bachenberg, Patricia Poprick
Political parties in Wisconsin, another state with disqualified Republican electors, are not expected to choose their potential electors in 2024. until Octoberand one legal settlement prohibits unauthorized 2020 voters from supporting Trump again. And there are no 2020 Trump voters on the Republican Party’s rolls this year for Arizona and Georgia.
Many legal experts believe that changes to federal law The administration of the electoral vote count in Congress, as well as criminal and civil charges against some Trump supporters for their actions in 2020, will likely prevent them from engaging in similar efforts this year.
Some election watchers, however, worry that voters involved in the effort to overturn the election results will have another chance to represent one of the country’s two major political parties in a crucial process for transferring power in American democracy.
Who are these returning Trump voters?
Many of the returning Trump voters are current or former state and local Republican leaders, including McDonald, the Nevada Republican Party chairman.
“The decision about who is a voter is a decision that political parties make, and those people are usually party loyal,” said Rebecca Green, an associate professor of election law at William & Mary Law School. “You’re choosing who you want to vote for your party’s candidate. That’s how our system works.”
However, the Electoral College system was challenged in 2020 when Republican electors in several states where Trump lost the popular vote submitted forged certificates to Congress, claiming that Trump had won their state’s electoral votes, which determine the winner of the presidential race.
Criminal charges have been filed against voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan And Nevada by Democratic-led prosecutors, although a state judge in Nevada issued an indictment against six GOP electors in June, saying the state picked the wrong venue for the lawsuit.
John Haggard, a Trump supporter in Michigan who faces eight felony counts related to filing false certifications in 2020, gives two thumbs up after the state’s governor announced all of Michigan’s electoral votes for Trump in 2016 in Lansing, Mich.
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Most Trump voters did not respond to multiple requests for comment from NPR or declined to comment.
David Kallman is the attorney for one of Michigan’s 2020 Trump voters, Choate, who will return as a potential Republican voter in 2024 while facing eight felony charges, including conspiracy to commit counterfeiting. Choate and the other accused GOP voters have pleaded not guilty, and Kallman said they relied on legal advice from GOP lawyers when they signed the second page of the certificate without reading the first page, which states that for the 2020 election, they are “Elected and Duly Qualified Electors for President and Vice President of the United States from the State of Michigan.”
“Should these voters have read the documents and all that? I wouldn’t argue with that,” Kallman said. “But the fact is that that’s not what they’re being charged with. They’re being charged with attempted fraud, you know, knowingly lying and making a false document. That’s clearly not true.”
Kallman said he does not expect a ruling in the case against Michigan’s GOP electors until next year, leaving open the possibility of Choate being called to serve as an official 2024 elector while still under indictment, if Michigan’s governor certifies Trump as the state’s winner.
“If it is certified that [Vice President] Harris won and there was another effort to try to get voters to sign something, you can bet I would be involved in that and would be giving my clients the appropriate advice and counsel. I would stop there,” Kallman added.
However, in Pennsylvania and New Mexico, no Trump voters in the 2020 election have been charged.
In an email to NPR, the Pennsylvania attorney general’s press office said there was no change to its position on what voters did as stated in the 2022 statement sent. LancasterOnline“These ‘fake ballots’ included a provision that they would only be used if the courts overturned the results in Pennsylvania, which did not happen,” the statement said. “While their language and policies were intentionally misleading and intended to harm our democracy, based on our initial review, our office does not believe this meets the legal standard for counterfeiting.”
New Mexico’s Trump voters included a similar conditional provision.
Ash Khare, one of Pennsylvania’s Trump voters, said he did not consider himself a “fake voter” but a “true patriot who did the right thing,” citing an ongoing legal battle at the time over Pennsylvania’s ballot that many legal experts said would go nowhere.
“We are not being smart,” Khare said. “We are just trying to cover our bases in case we decide to go another way.”
Asked about his reaction when he first heard about the allegations against Trump voters in other states, Khare laughed and said: “What we thought was, we’re smart. They screwed up. They should have given the same warning as we did.”
Patricia Poprik (center), who is serving as a second-term presidential elector for Trump, is sworn in with other 2016 Republican electors at the Pennsylvania Capitol in Harrisburg, Pa.
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Matt Rourke/AP
Another signatory to Pennsylvania’s certification — Andy Reilly, a member of the state’s Republican National Committee — said he wanted to continue serving as a potential voter this year “because I know sometimes in the heat of a campaign, people can get carried away and they can cross the line.”
“I will make sure that we do everything we can to protect, if legal, the candidate’s rights, but not do anything that I think would violate the law or the Constitution, like I did last time,” added Reilly, an attorney.
Why the 2024 Election Will Be Different From the 2020 Election (and Why It Won’t)
Voters will enter a different environment this year than they did in 2020 after the federal Voting Count Reform Act is signed into law in 2022, said Green of William & Mary Law School.
Green added that many of the “loopholes” in the previous process — including failing to define which state executive agency was responsible for certifying the state’s electors — have now been patched.
And charges against some illegal Trump voters are still pending.
“Given the prosecutions of electors for fraud and conspiracy, I think people in that position would think twice before becoming electors and holding an informal meeting of the Electoral College, unless there was significant ongoing litigation that would suggest an indeterminate outcome,” Green said.
Mary McCord, a former Justice Department official who is now executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Protection and Advocacy at Georgetown University Law Center, helped bring a civil lawsuit against 2020 Trump voters in Wisconsin, where a settlement agreement now bars those electors from serving again in any US presidential election with Trump’s name on the ballot.
While McCord agreed that Trump voters would likely have a harder time trying to mount similar efforts this year if Trump loses, she warned that persistent misinformation about the elections and their results could still fuel another effort.
The Electoral Reform Act “would certainly raise the bar” by requiring one-fifth of both the House and Senate to object to a state’s vote, rather than one representative and one senator as before, McCord noted. “But that’s not an impossible threshold to meet, especially if there’s a false narrative that there was election fraud in a particular state.”
Edited by Benjamin Swasey
