NewsSome Trump Electors In Swing States Are Primed To ‘Stop The Steal’...

Some Trump Electors In Swing States Are Primed To ‘Stop The Steal’ Again In 2024

Roxan Wetzel is a relative newcomer to politics. She began to get involved in 2019, she said, inspired by the start of North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson’s meteoric rise in politics.

“Our government was founded on the principle that it would be ordinary citizens that go to serve in government,” Wetzel told TPM. “Mark is that guy.”

Wetzel’s journey as an activist since then has taken her far. She had a stint as chairwoman of her county GOP, and recently ran, successfully, to become a presidential elector for Donald Trump in 2024.

Once treated as a mere formality, Trump’s attempt to stay in power after losing the 2020 election turned electors like Wetzel into a potential hinge point for the outcome of the election. In November and December 2020, Trump pressured election officials and state legislatures not to affirm Biden’s victory. When that failed, his attorneys recruited slates of “alternate” electors to send to Congress. Among them were some of the same people who would have been 2020 electors for their state had Trump won.

The fake electors were the keystone of Trump’s plot to stay in power, and proved to be especially low-hanging fruit for prosecutors: those involved allegedly created and submitted a fake document to the federal government. Those who participated in alternate electors schemes faced prosecution in four states. Congress addressed the ambiguities that Trump exploited in 2020 with a 2022 law called the Electoral Count Reform Act, specifying that the governor of a state certifies the electors and tightening procedures for how a state’s votes are debated. 

But despite the criminal investigations and legal changes, the 2024 Trump campaign has speculated about contesting the election past Election Day, well into January 2025. Trump has repeatedly refused to commit to accepting the results of the election, and has been spreading 2020-esque claims of widespread fraud. In several states — including the swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Nevada — Republicans who acted as fake electors in 2020 are again signed up to serve as electors in 2024. Many others swing state electors are publicly outspoken 2020 election deniers. 

It all raises an obvious question: If asked by the Trump campaign, would any 2024 Trump electors convene in the event of a Harris victory as part of another, perhaps even more farcical, effort to attain power after losing?

TPM contacted 61 of the 83 people who, per secretary of state offices, are set to serve as 2024 electors for Trump in six swing states — Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Arizona. (The state GOP in a seventh swing state, Wisconsin, has said that their electors will abide by whichever candidate is certified as the winner; the state’s 2020 fake electors are subject to a civil settlement that bars them from participating again.) Each candidate fields a slate of electors equal in number to that state’s Electoral College votes. The vast majority of the electors TPM contacted declined to speak or did not reply to requests for comment.

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