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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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If this is true, then everyone who issued tweets encouraging faithless electors in 2016 is also straightforwardly guilty.

Do members of the electoral college swear an oath of office to uphold the constitution? Does Georgia have a law requiring electors to cast their votes according to the election results? These are serious questions, I sincerely don't know.

If they do, and a person called an elector from Georgia and asked them to violate the law by being a faithless elector, then yes it does appear that such a person would be straightforwardly guilty.

Do members of the electoral college swear an oath of office to uphold the constitution?

No - among other places, this is discussed in Baude essay on Section 3, because it creates an interesting lacuna (a presidential elector who engages in an insurrection is not disqualified from future office, but an oath-taking officer who engages in an insurrection is disqualified from being a presidential elector).

Does Georgia have a law requiring electors to cast their votes according to the election results? These are serious questions, I sincerely don't know.

No - see here (although that is the status now, not as of 2020). According to that map, the only states where being a faithless elector is a crime (and thus the only ones where secondary liability for advocating a crime could conceivably trigger) are both Carolinas, New Mexico and Oklahoma. The more normal approach is to declare the faithless elector's vote void and to allow the other electors for that state to replace them.

In addition, a rando tweeting into the aether would be protected by the 1st amendment in a way that a high government official making a personal phone call to an individual elector backed up by detailed (false) arguments of why the election was fraudulent and vague threats of criminal prosecution for covering up the fraud would not be - the law distinguishes between non-serious and serious crime-encouraging speech.

Not sure whether things were much different in 2016, but I do seem to recall some electors not from any of those states being penalized -- it's irrelevant though.

Regardless of which states attach penalties, electors in most (all?) states do in fact swear an oath to vote according to the results in their state -- the debatable part would be whether they can be considered "public officials" -- which I'd argue against, but "parts of this indictment are based on debatable legal theories" does not seem to be holding anybody up in this business!

Anyways, if you acknowledge that certain states would consider faithless electorism to be some kind of crime, even one would be enough -- this was very much a nationwide, organized, and well funded advocacy exercise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_electors_in_the_2016_United_States_presidential_election#Public_outreach_to_electors

A conspiracy, if you will! So while random twitterati might squeak by on whatever's left of the 1A, I think your assertion that (say) The Hamilton Electors would be in a different position here than Trump and his cohorts is unsupported.

(I'd say it's actually somewhat worse in that their justification was not "We think Trump committed fraud" but rather "We don't like Trump and want to subvert the will of the voters", and also that they actually succeeded in flipping some electors! At least a few were fined as I recall.)

Thank you!

I find it a bit bemusing when people pose these questions with the implication that if someone in a somewhat-similar-but-somewhat-different situation wasn't charged with the same crime, there must be some kind of corruption or double standard. Most the time it's just that details are different and details matter.

Biden swore to uphold the Constitution, but created the "Covid" eviction moratorium, which was unconstitutional. If he asks someone to violate the law by preventing a landlord from getting rid of a tenant, is he straightforwardly guilty?

Under OCGA 16-4-7? I wouldn't think so, no. I don't believe that a landlord failing to evict a tenant would constitute a felony.

Was there some other statute you were thinking of? If so you'll need to point me to it.

He'd hypothetically (or maybe not so hypothetically) be telling the government to fine or arrest landlords who do evict their tenants.

Who exactly is "the government" in this context?