12 thoughts on “Who Won Georgia In 2020?”

1. Some people need to hang.

2. If it had gone to trial and Trump had been convicted/sentenced; on appeal the appeals court might say, “Well….Trump didn’t know about the 315K unsigned by poll workers early voting ballots in Georgia that should have been rejected so it doesn’t essentially dispute the prosecution’s argument that he (Trump) “lied” about his belief that the election was “rigged”. Furthermore they would likely argue he still tried to pressure Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes. With that likely biased jury pool he probably would have been found guilty; whether he would have gone to prison would depend on the integrity of the appeals process in that state which I have little confidence in. Alan Dershowitz seems to feel that allot of it would have gone down to the judges’ instruction to the jury; if he said well the prosecution has to show that he (Trump) lied about his belief in the election being rigged in order for you to convict that would have helped Trump. But he (Dershowitz) suggested the judge might instead say something like “…Well maybe Trump believed the election was “rigged” but he should have known that it wasn’t”. That kind of instruction would likely have produced a conviction with that jury pool.

3. And of course their argument about the “fraudulent, fake electors” (actually a alternate slate of electors part of the process of challenging the certification). Well if Trump “fraudulently” “lied/refused” to accept the legitimacy of the election results that makes his challenge to such “illegal”. Even if it turned out later that the Georgia election results were fraudulent (315K votes that should have been rejected). Because Trump didn’t know about that at the time he undertook said “criminal” actions.

   1. And of course their argument about the “fraudulent, fake electors” (actually a alternate slate of electors part of the process of challenging the certification).

      Sorry, Tim. It didn’t happen that way. First, the word you’re looking for isn’t “alternate”, it’s “fake”. I don’t have a problem with the appointment of fake electors for political grandstanding. It’s part of the game to grandstand. But they weren’t even slightly useful for the purpose of challenging certification.

      So far, it’s pretty innocuous. The problem comes in how those fake electors were used. In the days before January 6, Trump attempted to persuade Mike Pence to go along with a plan. We’ll probably never know the full details, but as part of the attempt, Pence received a memo describing how his role would work along with some rationalizations for why it was legal and proper. This was the John Eastman memo. On the second page, Eastman outlines a six step process for exploiting those fake electors.

      1. VP Pence, presiding over the joint session (or Senate Pro Tempore Grassley, if Pence recuses himself), begins to open and count the ballots, starting with Alabama (without conceding that the procedure, specified by the Electoral Count Act, of going through the States alphabetically is required).

      2. When he gets to Arizona, he announces that he has multiple slates of electors, and so is going to defer decision on that until finishing the other States. This would be the first break with the procedure set out in the Act.

      3. At the end, he announces that because of the ongoing disputes in the 7 States, there are no electors that can be deemed validly appointed in those States. That means the total number of “electors appointed” – the language of the 12thAmendment — is 454. This reading of the 12th Amendment has also been advanced by Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe (here). A “majority of the electors appointed” would therefore be 228. There are at this point 232 votes for Trump, 222 votes for Biden. Pence then gavels President Trump as re-elected.

      4. Howls, of course, from the Democrats, who now claim, contrary to Tribe’s prior position, that 270 is required. So Pence says, fine. Pursuant to the 12thAmendment, no candidate has achieved the necessary majority. That sends the matter to the House, where the “the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote . . . .” Republicans currently control 26 of the state delegations, the bare majority needed to win that vote. President Trump is re-elected there as well.

      5. One last piece. Assuming the Electoral Count Act process is followed and, upon getting the objections to the Arizona slates, the two houses break into their separate chambers, we should not allow the Electoral Count Act constraint on debate to control. That would mean that a prior legislature was determining the rules of the present one — a constitutional no-no (as Tribe has forcefully argued). So someone – Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, etc. – should demand normal rules(which includes the filibuster). That creates a stalemate that would give the state legislatures more time to weigh in to formally support the alternate slate of electors, if they had not already done so.

      6. The main thing here is that Pence should do this without asking for permission– either from a vote of the joint session or from the Court. Let the other side challenge his actions in court, where Tribe (who in 2001 conceded the President of the Senate might be in charge of counting the votes) and others who would press a lawsuit would have their past position — that these are non-justiciable political questions – thrown back at them, to get the lawsuit dismissed. The fact is that the Constitution assigns this power to the Vice President as the ultimate arbiter. We should take all of our actions with that in mind.

      The too long; didn’t read summary? A weaselly justification that the existence of those fake electors means that Vice President Pence could disfranchise the states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. These states have the 84 electoral votes and 13 million voters that would be dropped from the count. Yes, I’m sore about it. And when not if the Democrats contest it, the plan would be to throw the vote to the House where the Republicans have an edge.

      Sorry, this would have been brazenly illegal. It should be no surprise that Pence and congressional leadership all refused to participate.

      I’ll note that Trump praised a “John” in his speech as a “brilliant lawyer” and then followed that immediately with a long scold of Mike Pence. So looks like Trump acknowledged here the plan and the failed attempt to get Pence on board.

      1. Is there a precedent for a state sending multiple slates of electors? What happened then?

         I find it hard to believe this never happened before.

      2. You are outlying essentially what presumably the prosecution’s case against Trump would have been had it gone to trial the information is probably the result of leaks from said prosecutors to the media. What’s the defenses argument? My understanding is that chessman the architect of the so-called fake elector scheme stated that he told Trump that it was legal and that he maintains at the time and still that it was legal. Although he took a plea deal. If Trump’s actions were clearly illegal it makes little difference whether he believed or didn’t believe that the election was rigged there was no reason to obsess on that point. The reason appears to be is not clear that it was illegal so they wanted to say there was a fraudulent basis for his attempts to overturn the election thereby solving the problem of proving that the actions themselves were illegal. In any case they had 4 years to make their case against Trump 4 years to indict arrest try and convict and they weren’t able to do so.

         1. “My understanding is that chessman the architect of the so-called fake elector scheme stated that he told Trump that it was legal and that he maintains at the time and still that it was legal.”

            Correction: It was Kenneth Chesebro; and while he did say something to that effect he has subsequently and in some communications given a more nuanced responses on those points. And as stated he took a plea deal and he has been also disbarred Difficult to say what he would have said at trial if it had happened.

            1. At first I thought you meant John Eastman but could find no evidence that he ever accepted a plea deal. He too has been disbarred in California but as I understand it he is appealing that ruling.

         2. For me, this isn’t just about the criminality of the plan. There are deeper problems here than the legality of the scheme. Look at bullet point 2:

            When he [Vice President Pence] gets to Arizona, he announces that he has multiple slates of electors, and so is going to defer decision on that until finishing the other States.

            The strategy starts by treating a slate of fake electors as if they were real. Then in bullet point 3, he’s supposed to declare “there are no electors that can be deemed validly appointed in those States” and disregard the electoral votes from those states and giving Trump the win. The rest of the shenanigans follow from that interpretation. A bit of theater transforms into a dishonest legal loophole to throw an election.

            This is terrible from two angles. First, as I noted before, it’s grossly anti-democratic and disrespectful. The plan throws away the votes of 13 million people directly and of course, shifts the winner from Biden to Trump disrespecting the entire country.

            Second, it’s a horrible precedent. It’s a game that any sitting president can play even if they don’t have a majority in the House. Fake electors aren’t hard to come by and as long as you get some wins in states, you can throw away enough states voting for the other side to eek out a win.

            Finally, what was the end game here? What would Trump do next when this hit the courts? If he did nothing, the plan would have gone down in flames – it’s not enough to refuse to “ask for permission”. There are plenty of ways to push ahead and seize a second term, but none of these would be democratic or respect the rule of law. And what would the US public do? The January 6 protest was so unpopular that various parties were blaming Antifa or FBI plants right away. How would a blatant power grab go?

            As to the legality of the scheme, Trump couldn’t get any key players to go along. So the crime didn’t happen. At best, there’s a weak conspiracy charge. That’s why nothing happened over the past four years.

            1. “As to the legality of the scheme, Trump couldn’t get any key players to go along. So the crime didn’t happen.”

               Yes similar in a lot of ways to the current supposed schemes to get around Constitutional POTUS term limits to get Trump to somehow run for a third term in 2028. Apparently by having (my understanding) Vance to run and then pick Trump as a VP running mate and afterwards if Vance wins he resigns in favor of Trump. Is it legal? Difficult to say there seems to be some vague argument made by of all people Dershowitz in a book that hasn’t come out yet as to its possible legality but I agree it would be disastrous for the country.

4. Eventually in 2025, Scott Leinendecker…

   In 2025, Dominion Voting Systems was acquired by Scott Leiendecker, a former Republican election official from Missouri and founder of KnowInk, an electronic poll book company…

   …The acquisition was conducted through a new company called Liberty Vote, under which Dominion was rebranded Liberty Vote stated the rebranding aimed to restore public confidence in election integrity, emphasizing a shift toward hand-marked paper ballots and domestic software development, distancing itself from the controversies of the past The move gave Leiendecker control over election technology used in more than half of U.S. states, including jurisdictions that use both Dominion and KnowInk systems, covering the full election process from voter check-in to ballot tabulation…

   via Brave search…

5. Yeah, this is a bad look, as Mark Hemingway says. But on its face this looks like a procedural failure, not fraudulent ballots per se — they got counted on the recount because they were legit. But it does cast a shadow over the election in Georgia in 2020.

   The other problem is, Trump would have needed two more states even if he did win Georgia.

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