By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor
A very long time ago, back in 1787, in fact, a group of patriots worked very hard to design a workable government – for a new country that was committed to individual liberty.
The Constitutional Convention, held in Philadelphia that hot summer, struggled for months and finally hammered out a brilliant compromise plan for a government of “shared sovereignty,” in which the national government, and all the individual states, and all individual citizens would each be “sovereign,” depending on the issue.
For all intents and purposes, for the first time on earth, a government was designed from scratch in which “We the People” reserved certain powers to ourselves, delegated others to our state governments, and only delegated a very specific remainder to a national “federal” body. And that federal body was itself split between three branches, a legislative, a judiciary, and an executive.
When they designed this model, they did not anticipate the birth of political parties (they called them “factions” in those days); in fact, they tried hard to discourage such things.
That particular effort failed.
By the end of the very first term of our first president, future presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison had begun their efforts to organize our first political party. By the end of the 1790s, Congress was already awash in functioning parties.
Nowhere did this pose more of a challenge than with the design of the presidency. Our Framers crafted a House and Senate based at least loosely on the British Houses of Commons and Lords; these bodies could function without parties, or could function just as well with them. No liberties had to be taken with the Constitution’s design on that front.
By contrast, the selection of the presidency was indeed affected.
Let’s first recall how the Framers had intended the process to work. Every state government would be given a number of votes – a total representing the state’s two Senate seats plus however many House seats it had. Each state government would then appoint wise elder statesmen (not sitting members of Congress, however) to fill these slots.
Each state’s delegates – known as “Electors” – would then join with the similarly chosen teams of all the other states, and all together would make up the “Electoral College,” a group formed strictly to select a president and vice president.
Note that in this plan, every state would have only one set of electors. There was no alternate slate; there were no “imposters” or “rivals.” The state legislature appointed a team and entrusted them to choose well on behalf of their home state.
It hasn’t happened that way in centuries.
Once the parties arose, each party would create its own slate of electors-in-waiting. Republicans, Democrats, Whigs, Greens, Libertarians, whatever. If a state had twelve elector slots, then there would always be two or three or four groups of twelve each, all of them electors-in-waiting. These have been the party stalwarts of each party, waiting with baited breath for the results on Election Night to see if they’d be traveling to Washington, DC for the big formality or not.
For at least 150 years now, none of these electors have had any real deliberations at all; these electors are just the vehicles to perform the perfunctory duty of declaring their state for whoever won their state. Sometimes they know on Election Night if they’ll be making the trip; sometimes they don’t know for days.
And sometimes, as in 2000 and 2020, they don’t know for sure until weeks later, as recounts and court challenges grind, excruciatingly slowly, toward a final result.
This is the American standard now, not the exception. Thus it has been for as long as there have been strong political parties.
In some states, the party central committee appoints the electors; in other states, the state convention appoints them. With the major parties, each party nominee’s presidential campaign usually has some say in the selection of this honor.
But in any case, while they represent their party, they themselves don’t really do any of the deliberation that our Framers anticipated. The party chose its nominee without the electors’ involvement; the voters cast their ballots on Election Day without these electors’ involvement. If their party wins their state, they travel to Washington and cast their ballots for their party’s slate. If their party loses their state, they stay home, and the other party’s slate goes to Washington to go through the formalities.
As we can clearly see, it’s almost impossible for an elector slate to “cheat” the system.
Almost anyone else involved in an election, if corrupt, can cheat in some way, but not the Electors. They can’t pull a fast one, even if they want to, because all the decisions are out of their hands. They have virtually no power at all.
It’s not unheard of for there to be challenges and recounts that postpone the decision of which slate goes to Washington. Many of us remember 2000, when the Al Gore campaign challenged the results in Florida, and both the Bush and Gore electors stood at the ready for weeks, until the courts finally resolved the matter.
The same thing happened in 2020. So many states had seen internal violations of campaign law, and so many sworn reports of blatant election fraud were recorded, that there were court cases in numerous states that were not resolved by the time the final electoral college report was due in Congress. As a result, in those states, both the Republican slates and the Democrat slates stood at the ready, in case a decision by a court, or a decision by their state legislature, would direct the other one to represent their state in the final tally.
Unfortunately, the 2020 election turned out to be a year of firsts, in more ways than one.
Just as it was the first year in which numerous county election officials violated their own state laws in the manner of conducting the elections (everything from allowing ballot harvesting by partisans and patronage workers, to illegally creating unsolicited mail-in ballots by the millions), it was also the first year in which one party capitalized on the public’s ignorance of routine election processes to imagine crimes where none were committed.
As we’ve seen, it’s virtually impossible for either a Republican or Democrat slate of electors to break the law in how they conduct their duties. They’re signed up in the summer at their state conventions; they fill out some forms, and then they’re on standby until released. Everything is in the hands of the voters and their state government.
Even so, we now see the corrupt attorneys general of multiple states – Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – the list seems to grow daily – charging their duly-appointed Republican slates-in-waiting with being “fake electors” – just for properly remaining on standby while the cases worked their way through the courts.
It is an outrage, and in the interest of good government, both Republicans and Democrats alike should stand up to denounce these rogue prosecutors and impeach them for such an attack on the American election process.
Make no mistake: this is a brazen attempt to terrorize anyone “tainted” with involvement in the Republican party. These Democrat hacks aren’t satisfied with persecuting President Trump with fabricated charges in an effort to keep him from running again; they are doing everything in their power to scare all Republican leaders out of party activism as well.
Who’s going to serve as a fundraiser or campaign manager for a Republican candidate, or as attorney or accountant for a Republican state committee, if there’s a real likelihood that some crooked kangaroo court will get a ham sandwich indictment out of an easily-conned grand jury, to ruin their business and their reputations, and bankrupt them in legal fees?
This is the goal. It’s not just an attack on President Trump.
These outlandish “fake elector” claims aim to starve the Republican Party of supporters, to erect a barrier to entry that keeps the best and brightest from daring to work for either the GOP or any Republican presidential campaign in the future.
These Democrat operatives are conducting a full frontal assault on the American system of government. They have gone too far, and must be reined in before the 2024 election cycle gets underway, or they will indeed irrevocably poison American government.
Copyright 2023 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer and transportation manager, writer, and actor. A one-time county chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party, he has been writing regularly for Illinois Review since 2009. Follow John F. Di Leo on Facebook, Twitter, Gettr or TruthSocial.
A collection of John’s Illinois Review articles about vote fraud, The Tales of Little Pavel, and his 2021 political satires about current events, Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes One and Two, are available, in either paperback or eBook, only on Amazon.
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