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      Meet the Electoral College’s Biggest Critics: Some of the Electors Themselves

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyMeet the Electoral College’s Biggest Critics: Some of the Electors Themselves“Do we really want 538 Bob Nemanichs electing our president?” Bob Nemanich, a former elector, doesn’t. And he is hopeful that 2020 might put future electors out of a gig.Polly Baca serves as one of the Electoral College’s 538 electors, while all but calling for the group to be abolished.Credit…Daniel Brenner for The New York TimesDec. 12, 2020Updated 7:06 p.m. ETFew critics of the Electoral College are quite like Polly Baca.Ms. Baca believes the Electoral College, which has chosen American presidents since George Washington, “has absolutely no reason to be.” This year, she brought, and lost, a Supreme Court case challenging her state’s rules over how electors vote. Before electors cast their ballots for president in 2016, she invited several members to her home to plot a way — also unsuccessful — to circumvent the outcome.But unlike Donald J. Trump, whose raft of legal filings and maneuvers has failed to change the result of this year’s election, Ms. Baca is a Democrat. And she even serves as one of the body’s 538 electors while all but calling for the group to be abolished.“There’s absolutely no reason why the world’s strongest democracy doesn’t elect its C.E.O. with the popular vote,” said Ms. Baca, who will cast one of Colorado’s nine electoral votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr., the president-elect. “I’ve been on the outside, but I prefer to go on the inside to see what I can do.”It is the Electoral College, not the direct vote of the American people, that will decide the next president on Monday, when its 538 electors, chosen mostly during state party gatherings earlier this year, sign their ballots and send them to Washington.For generations, the body was viewed as a rubber stump to the will of the voters — but as with many things, scrutiny came only when things seemed to go wrong. The 2000 contest between Al Gore and George W. Bush showed that a mere 537 popular ballots could tip Florida’s Electoral College votes, and with it, the presidency. The 2016 election proved that a president could lose by millions of popular votes, yet be handed the White House anyway.“The head of the student council in your middle school was elected by a popular vote,” said Alexander Keyssar, a Harvard historian and the author of a book called “Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?” “I know it’s an old-fashioned notion, but the most fundamental democratic value is that all votes should count equally.”(He is not a fan.)Yet it’s hard to think of a time before this year that dragged the Electoral College, and American democracy with it, into such dangerous territory.The election, where it was clear by evening on Election Day that Mr. Biden had won the popular vote, turned into a nail-biter that stretched on for days — largely because of the high volume of mail ballots in a few states rich in Electoral College votes. President Trump used the delay to make false claims from the White House that fraud was underway and that he had actually won.Mr. Trump then turned to the courts to swing the Electoral College his way, backing lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin. The president’s lawyers appeared to hope that a friendly judge would overturn the results in one or more states that would allow him the 270 electors he needed to remain in office.As judges dismissed his suits, the president urged Republican state lawmakers to send delegations to the Electoral College who would vote for him anyway. He then brought White House influence to bear on a county election body in Michigan — one more last-ditch effort to stall the state from sending electors for Mr. Biden.That has left electors like Ronda Vuillemont-Smith, a conservative Oklahoma activist who will cast her vote for Mr. Trump on Monday, believing the president will stay in office.“I’m going to be quite honest with you, I think Donald Trump will be president for a second term,” she said, citing continued attempts to overturn the results.Yet for other electors, the frantic moves by a sitting president — indeed, most of the election itself — has led to soul-searching, not just on who should be president, but also on how the president should be chosen.“These tactics are tantamount to those in authoritarian governments,” said Alan Kennedy, a presidential elector in Denver. He said the election reminded him of a stint when he lived in Uganda and its president jailed his main opponent ahead of an election, something Mr. Trump also has repeatedly called for during his campaigns.Mr. Kennedy plans to dutifully cast his vote on Monday for Mr. Biden. But for Mr. Kennedy, a captain in the Colorado Army National Guard who served in the Middle East, a question still looms large behind the task ahead of him: Is such a system really in keeping with the nation’s ideals?“What’s terrifying is how close we came to another election of a president who won the Electoral College while losing the popular vote,” he said.Robert Nemanich is quick to point out that he had no professional qualifications for being an elector other than being a high school math teacher.Credit…Daniel Brenner for The New York TimesRobert Nemanich, a former elector from Colorado Springs, puts it another way.“Do we really want 538 Bob Nemanichs electing our president?” he asked.Mr. Nemanich is quick to point out his only professional qualification for the job was being a high school math teacher. After volunteering as a Bernie Sanders primary delegate in 2016, Mr. Nemanich landed the job after giving out credentials at a state Democratic convention where selecting the electors was one of the agenda items.“I was one of the few asking to be an elector, and I would say 90 percent of people didn’t know what that was,” he said.And while this year’s electors include respected party officials and well-known activists — Hillary Clinton said she would be an elector for New York State — there have also been some unexpected names recruited for the task.They include Terri Hodge, a former state representative in Dallas who was sentenced to a prison term after pleading guilty to corruption charges in 2010, whom Texas Democrats selected as an elector this year. (As Mr. Trump won Texas, Ms. Hodge will not cast a ballot.)Tracking Disinformation More

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      YouTube to Forbid Videos Claiming Widespread Election Fraud

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyTracking Viral MisinformationYouTube to Forbid Videos Claiming Widespread Election FraudDec. 9, 2020, 12:25 p.m. ETDec. 9, 2020, 12:25 p.m. ETYouTube’s announcement is a reversal of a much-criticized company policy on election videos.Credit…Dado Ruvic/ReutersYouTube on Wednesday announced changes to how it handles videos about the 2020 presidential election, saying it would remove new videos that mislead people by claiming that widespread fraud or errors influenced the outcome of the election.The company said it was making the change because Tuesday was the so-called safe harbor deadline — the date by which all state-level election challenges, such as recounts and audits, are supposed to be completed. YouTube said that enough states have certified their election results to determine that Joseph R. Biden Jr. is the president-elect.YouTube’s announcement is a reversal of a much-criticized company policy on election videos. Throughout the election cycle, YouTube, which is owned by Google, has allowed videos spreading false claims of widespread election fraud under a policy that permits videos that comment on the outcome of an election. Under the new policy, videos about the election uploaded before the safe harbor deadline would remain on the platform, with YouTube appending an information panel linking to the Office of the Federal Register’s election results certification notice.In a blog post on Wednesday, YouTube pushed back on the idea that it had allowed harmful and misleading elections-related videos to spread unfettered on its site. The company said that since September, it had shut down over 8,000 channels and “thousands” of election videos that violated its policies. Since Election Day, the company said, it had also shown fact-check panels over 200,000 times above relevant election-related search results on voter fraud narratives such as “Dominion voting machines” and “Michigan recount.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Even in Defeat, Trump Tightens Grip on State G.O.P. Lawmakers

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyEven in Defeat, Trump Tightens Grip on State G.O.P. LawmakersIn Pennsylvania, the president’s false claims of a rigged vote may inflame the party base for years to come. One lawmaker said that refusing to back up his assertions would “get my house bombed.”President Trump has twisted the arms of state lawmakers in an effort to overturn the election results.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesDec. 9, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ETLast week, allies of President Trump accused Republican leaders in Pennsylvania of being “cowards” and “liars” and of letting America down.Mr. Trump himself called top Republicans in the General Assembly in his crusade to twist the arms of officials in several states and reverse an election he lost. The Pennsylvania lawmakers told the president they had no power to convene a special session to address his grievances.But they also rewarded his efforts: On Friday, the State House speaker and majority leader joined hard-right colleagues — whom they had earlier resisted — and called on Congress to reject Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s 81,000-vote victory in Pennsylvania.The extraordinary intervention by the president, and the willingness of some top party leaders to abet his effort to subvert an election, demonstrates how Mr. Trump’s sway over elected Republicans is likely to endure after he leaves office and how his false claims of a “rigged” 2020 vote may inflame the party base for years to come.Courts across the country have summarily thrown out Mr. Trump’s claims of a stolen election. But 64 Republicans in the General Assembly signed a letter last week urging Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation to reject the state’s Electoral College votes for Mr. Biden. Kim Ward, the Republican majority leader of the Pennsylvania Senate, said the president had called her to declare there was fraud in the voting. But she said she had not been shown the letter to Congress, which was pulled together hastily, before its release.Asked if she would have signed it, she indicated that the Republican base expected party leaders to back up Mr. Trump’s claims — or to face its wrath.“If I would say to you, ‘I don’t want to do it,’” she said about signing the letter, “I’d get my house bombed tonight.”A major issue facing Republicans everywhere, including those in Pennsylvania — where open seats for governor and the U.S. Senate are on the ballot in 2022 — is whether the party will put forward Trump-aligned candidates in future races. The president lost Pennsylvania, but Republicans made down-ballot gains in two statewide races and picked up seats in the legislature.“Those who are continuing to beat on this drum that the election was rigged are trying to appease Trump’s base and get their support early on,” said State Representative Ryan Bizzarro, a member of the Democratic leadership.Mr. Bizzarro said it would be a gift to Democrats if the Republican nominees for governor or Senate who emerge from primaries are remembered for echoing Mr. Trump’s baseless claims of mass fraud from mail-in ballots and his bitter-end resistance to conceding a loss.A pro-Trump rally outside the Supreme Court on Tuesday. The court later threw out a case seeking to invalidate Pennsylvania’s mail-in votes.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times“Forget all the Democrats who voted by mail — look at all the Republicans who voted by mail,” he said. “Are you saying their voice isn’t as important as the fringe who are blind to facts and the ways our Constitution clearly lays out elections?”On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court became the latest of dozens of tribunals to throw out a case brought by Trump allies, in this instance a Pennsylvania congressman and a losing congressional candidate. They had sought to invalidate the state’s 2.6 million mail-in votes, 77 percent of which were cast for Mr. Biden.Republicans argued that a 2019 state law authorizing no-excuse mail voting was unconstitutional, although it passed the Republican-led legislature and was signed by Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat.Earlier, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled against the same plaintiffs, one of whom was Sean Parnell, a former Army Ranger and a favorite of Mr. Trump’s who occasionally appears on Fox News. He lost his race for Congress to Representative Conor Lamb but has been mentioned as a potential statewide candidate in 2022.A Republican strategist in Pennsylvania, Charlie Gerow, expressed doubts that the trench fighting by party members over the legitimacy of the election would cast a stigma over Republicans in the midterm elections. “There will be so many candidates for statewide office that what happens in December 2020 will have very little bearing, in my judgment, on what happens in 2022,” he said.Nearly every state has certified the results of its election, and Mr. Biden has secured the 270 electoral votes needed to become the next president when the Electoral College meets on Monday.Nonetheless, the more than 60 Republicans in the Pennsylvania legislature — about half of the party’s total caucus — urged Congress to take one last stand for Mr. Trump and object to the state’s Biden electors.Tracking Disinformation More

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      As Trump Rails Against Loss, His Supporters Become More Threatening

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyAs Trump Rails Against Loss, His Supporters Become More ThreateningThe president’s baseless claims of voting fraud have prompted outrage among his loyalists and led to behavior that Democrats and even some Republicans say has become dangerous.President Trump at a summit meeting on the vaccine at the White House on Tuesday.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesBy More

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      He Pretended to Be Trump’s Family. Then Trump Fell for It.

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Great ReadHe Pretended to Be Trump’s Family. Then Trump Fell for It.For months, a 21-year-old Trump supporter impersonated Trump family members on Twitter, spreading conspiracy theories, asking for money and eventually drawing the attention of the president.Credit…Raphaelle MacaronBy More