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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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Well, hang on a sec. You started by objecting to the notion that "the electors committed fraud". You're now pointing to an offence which none of the false electors has been charged with.

Ok so maybe the relevant question is not whether the false electors themselves committed conspiracy to commit forgery, but whether Trump and the other people actually charged with that offence did. But if that's that's the case, the "contingent elector" explanation you proposed is a lot harder to justify:

Obviously the accurate term should be "contingent electors", in the sense that these would have been the correct electors if Trump prevailed in his various lawsuits. It's easy to imagine that in the case where he was able to establish fraud and the court determined that he had won the election, they wouldn't want the process to get held up by the need to quickly get some electors together to cast their votes and mail them to Washington, DC. The Georgia "fake slate" is dated December 14, so there would not have been much time to get these votes recorded if they had had to wait for all litigation to be resolved.

By Jan 6 all of Trump's legal challenges had failed. Nonetheless he still attempted to have these false electors accepted as the valid ones. So while the "contingent elector" theory may work as a defence for the electors themselves - and it may well be exactly why the electors have not also been charged with the same offence - it doesn't work for Trump and his inner circle.