WASHINGTON. — Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced criminal charges against 16 people on Tuesday for submitting a phony slate of electors to try to help Republican Donald Trump overturn his 2020 presidential election loss to Democrat Joe Biden.
What are electors?
US presidents are not elected by direct popular vote. Instead, each state appoints electors who select a president under a process specified by the US Constitution.
The winning candidate must receive at least 270 of the 538 total electoral votes.
Each of the 50 states is assigned a number of electoral votes that match the size of their congressional delegation. California will have 54 electoral votes in the 2024 presidential election, for example, while sparsely populated states like Vermont and Wyoming have three each. The District of Columbia also gets three electors.
Each presidential candidate has their own group of electors in each state, known as a “slate.”
After the election, each state awards its electoral votes to the slate aligned with the winning candidate.
In all but two states, the winner of the popular vote receives all of the state’s electoral votes. Maine and Nebraska award some of their electoral votes on a proportional basis.
Both split their votes in the 2020 election.
The electors cast their ballots on behalf of their candidate and send the results to Congress, which counts them up and certifies a winner.
If no candidate secures a majority, the House of Representatives picks the president and the Senate picks the vice president.
In most elections, the winner of the national popular vote has also won the Electoral College vote. But five times, the candidate who lost the popular vote has won the election – most recently in 2016, when Trump won 304 electoral votes even though he got 3 million fewer votes nationwide than Democrat Hillary Clinton.
The Michigan case is the first time criminal charges have been brought against people suspected of using the US political system to try to overturn Trump’s November 2020 election loss.
What happened after the 2020 election?
According to the congressional committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, Trump and his allies sought to overturn his defeat by convincing Republican-controlled legislatures in battleground states to name their own Trump-friendly electors or refuse to name any electors, even though Democrat Joe Biden had won the popular vote in those places.
Law professor John Eastman and Kenneth Chesebro, an adviser to Trump’s campaign, wrote legal memos arguing that state legislatures had the authority to choose their own electors, according to the committee’s final report. — Reuters
