An amateurish attempt at an Electoral College coup crashed four years ago. Could a more professional one be in the works this year?
The Transition Integrity Project’s hyperbolic scenarios make for a good political thriller using real-life characters, as Democratic political operatives and Never Trump Republicans gamed out dystopian post-election outcomes that usually led to military involvement.
Not surprisingly, they focused mostly on President Trump refusing to leave office. What was particularly unusual was the scenario of an outright Trump victory — though losing the popular vote — and Joe Biden refusing to concede. This scenario too alludes to military involvement.
Though it’s extremely unlikely this country will ever face Seven Days in May circumstances, it was no less than Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta who played the role of Biden refusing to concede, so this was no fringe movement. Recall Clinton herself said Biden “should not concede under any circumstances.”
As I remind readers in Abuse of Power: Inside the Three-Year Campaign to Impeach Donald Trump, much lower profile Democrats tried what amounted to an attempted Electoral College coup in 2016. The attempt barely had any time to work as almost no one was prepared for a Trump election night victory.
Democratic Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, was among the first to assert, “The Electoral College should choose someone other than Donald Trump to be president.”
Notably, Christine Pelosi, who was a California elector and daughter of House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, led a letter signed by 53 other electors asking Director of National Intelligence James Clapper for a briefing on Russian interference for the full Electoral College before electors convened in 50 state capitols. The letter asserted, “the Constitution envisions the Electoral College as a deliberative body that plays a critical role in our system of government — ensuring that the American people elect a president who is constitutionally qualified and fit to serve.”
Later, a group calling themselves the Hamilton Electors, founded by Bret Chiafalo, a Democratic elector from Washington State, and Michael Baca, a Democratic elector from Colorado, tried to lead a revolt. Earlier year, the founders were on the losing end of a case in which the Supreme Court ruled states can penalize faithless electors.
The Hamilton Electors first hoped to unite 135 Republicans and 135 Democrats behind a compromise Republican candidate — such as Mitt Romney or John Kasich, but eventually they moved to the nominally more realistic goal of trying to convince 37 Republican electors to stray from Trump, bringing his total below the needed 270 electoral votes — thus sending the election to the House of Representatives for the first time since 1824.
Separately, Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig teamed with Boston attorney R.J. Lyman and founded the Electors Trust to provide legal advice to electors to stray from their state’s winner.
In an ad sponsored by the group United For America, Martin Sheen, who once played a president on NBC’s West Wing, joined other Hollywood stars, including Debra Messing, Richard Schiff, and Bob Odenkirk, for a political ad aimed only at Republican electors. Each actor stated, “I’m not asking you to vote for Hillary Clinton.” They then requested that Republicans in the Electoral College be an “American hero” by keeping Trump out of the White House.
On Dec. 19, 2016, seven electors bolted from Trump or Clinton, but at least three separate organized efforts failed to reverse election night results.
These disparate and desperate efforts to alter the Electoral College outcome were doomed to fail and mostly laughable in 2016 when the Left was scrambling and had no real opportunity to pull together a substantial effort of flipping the election after Americans voted.
But, now, they have had four years to prepare after that trial run.
With Democrats claiming voter suppression and Republicans concerned about mail-in balloting, there is already an expectation of a 2000 post-election repeat.
The Transition Integrity Project is not a nefarious cabal, as it released those scenarios to the public rather than keeping them secret. But its mentality is revealing about what to expect after election day, amid all this talk of conceding under no circumstances.
Fred Lucas is the author of Abuse of Power: Inside the Three-Year Campaign to Impeach Donald Trump (Bombardier Books, 2020).
