No one has been charged in that effort yet, but Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco told CNN that federal prosecutors were looking into the fraudulent elector certifications.įorty-eight states have winner-take-all laws giving all their electoral votes to the top vote-getter in their states. Those seeking to submit slates of alternative electors in 2020 wanted to remove duly chosen electors by fiat and reverse the outcome in battleground states won by Biden and certified by state election officials. Most of those who did switch their votes broke their own states’ laws by not voting for the candidate to whom they were pledged. Basic Differences in 20 Effortsįirst, the Democrats were not calling for “alternate electors” in 2016 but “faithless electors” who were duly chosen to represent their states in the Electoral College. D’Souza himself was convicted of election finance fraud in 2014 for making illegal contributions to a Senate campaign in the names of others.Īs with anything involving the Electoral College, D’Souza’s claim requires some unpacking to reveal the apples-and-oranges character of his spurious claim. Trump most likely got the idea FROM THEM.”ĭ’Souza produced the film “2000 Mules” - which, as we’ve written, uses unreliable data to make unproven allegations of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. He then misleadingly claimed, “The Left and the Democrats were calling for alternate electors after the 2016 election. “I’m chuckling about the fake outrage over Trump seeking alternate electors for the 2020 election,” tweeted D’Souza. The scheme has become a focus of the House select committee investigating the Jan. In a snapshot of a tweet shared on Instagram, Dinesh D’Souza, a conservative political commentator, equated the two efforts and said the 2016 bid probably inspired then-President Trump in 2020 to pursue the alternate electors’ route. Now, the Democrats’ effort in 2016 has emerged as a justification for the Republican effort in 2020 to replace full slates of duly chosen electors pledged to Joe Biden with so-called “alternate electors” loyal to Trump. The effort cost Clinton more electoral votes than it did Trump. The effort ultimately failed, as expected, with Trump winning 304-227 after five Clinton electors and two Trump electors switched votes and took on the mantle of “faithless electors” - electors who cast a vote for someone other than their party’s nominee. Prior to the Electoral College vote, which Trump was expected to win 306-232, s ome progressive Democrats proposed getting Republican electors to switch their votes to Clinton or another Republican on the grounds Trump was unfit for office. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.9 million votes, but lost the Electoral College to Donald Trump. But a conservative commentator misleadingly claimed in a social media post that the Democrats were “calling for alternate electors” - as Trump did after losing the 2020 election. The Electoral College, he acknowledged, was a “vestige” from a time and a system that “put a lot of premium on states.After the 2016 presidential election, some progressive Democrats tried to convince electors for Donald Trump to switch their Electoral College votes to Hillary Clinton. President Obama, during his final press conference of the year, weighed in during his yearend news conference Friday. A CBS News poll last week showed Americans favor amending the Constitution to elect the president by popular vote, 54 to 41 percent. 8, protesting that the college had outlived its usefulness. Poll: More Americans believe popular vote should decide the presidentīecause of these two recent examples where the Electoral College outcome defied popular opinion, some clamored for its abolishment after Nov.In total, Gore won the popular vote by just over 540,000 ballots. Ultimately, Gore lost after recount efforts in Florida and a Supreme Court decision gave the state’s 25 electors to Bush. The states Clinton won that Gore lost were New Hampshire (4), Virginia (13), and Colorado (8). This was because ultimately, Gore won states (that Clinton lost) with higher electoral vote counts at the time, like Pennsylvania (23 electors), Michigan (18), and Wisconsin (10). Bush narrowly won with 271 electoral votes, compared to Gore’s 266, with a single elector abstaining in the official tally. In the case of the 2000 election, both the Electoral College and popular vote counts were much closer than this year’s race.
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