Here’s What The “Alternative Electors” Means and How It Will Work

Have you heard a lot about President Trump’s “alternative electors” but don’t understand what it means?

You’re not alone.

I have never in my life heard of this but it may just be the path to President Trump’s second term.

And merely judging by how much liberals are melting down over the idea tells me it actually has merit.

In case you missed this today, Newsmax just did an interview and explained what the Alternative Electors are, how they work, and how it may lead to a Trump win.

Watch:

And in case YouScared takes that down, I have a backup saved.

From Rumble:

Here’s more on the Alternative Electors:

https://twitter.com/travisakers/status/1338484357389017090

And this guy is awesome (toot toot!):

The absolute meltdown in January is going to be insane pic.twitter.com/CVEwgj8LwI

— Right Wing Cope (@RightWingCope) December 15, 2020

Stephen Miller: "Alternate" electors will keep Trump election challenge alive https://t.co/YbjaV1gRJ4 pic.twitter.com/C46JreN3MQ

— The Hill (@thehill) December 15, 2020

The Hill had more:

President Trump’s allies are preparing to send an “alternate” slate of electors to Congress, senior White House adviser Stephen Miller said Monday, signaling Trump will drag out his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election even after the Electoral College certifies Joe Biden as the winner.

Miller, appearing on Fox News as a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, brushed off the idea that the Electoral College vote marked any kind of end to the process.

“The only date in the Constitution is Jan. 20. So we have more than enough time to right the wrong of this fraudulent election result and certify Donald Trump as the winner of the election,” Miller said on “Fox & Friends.”

“As we speak, today, an alternate slate of electors in the contested states is going to vote and we’re going to send those results up to Congress,” he continued. “This will ensure that all of our legal remedies remain open. That means that if we win these cases in the courts, that we can direct that the alternate state of electors be certified.”

Electors from every state will meet on Monday to formally elect Biden as the next president. Those results will be certified by the states and submitted to Congress.

Miller indicated that Trump supporters will act as “alternates” in a handful of contested states, including Georgia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, to submit their own, unofficial results. Should the Trump campaign succeed in overturning the outcome in any of those states, Miller said, the alternate electors could then be recognized by Congress.

Nothing in the Constitution or state electoral processes allows for such an “alternate” slate of electors.

Miller also raised the idea of state legislatures stepping in to overturn the results or of Congress interceding.

Here’s even more about what happens next on January 6….

It’s called the 12th Amendment.

Watch this and prepare to have your mind blown:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&feature=youtu.be&v=EBcQ26ha0Ho

And in case that gets taken down, I have a backup on Rumble.

Too important to miss.

Here you go:

Full Text of the 12th Amendment, from Law.Cornell.edu:

12th Amendment

Amendment XII

The electors shall meet in their respective states and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves; they shall name in their ballots the person voted for as President, and in distinct ballots the person voted for as Vice-President, and they shall make distinct lists of all persons voted for as President, and of all persons voted for as Vice-President, and of the number of votes for each, which lists they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of the government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate;–The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted;–the person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice. And if the House of Representatives shall not choose a President whenever the right of choice shall devolve upon them, before the fourth day of March next following, then the Vice-President shall act as President, as in the case of the death or other constitutional disability of the President. The person having the greatest number of votes as Vice-President, shall be the Vice-President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of electors appointed, and if no person have a majority, then from the two highest numbers on the list, the Senate shall choose the Vice-President; a quorum for the purpose shall consist of two-thirds of the whole number of Senators, and a majority of the whole number shall be necessary to a choice. But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.

And from Wikipedia:

The Twelfth Amendment (Amendment XII) to the United States Constitution provides the procedure for electing the president and vice president. It replaced the procedure provided in Article II, Section 1, Clause 3, by which the Electoral College originally functioned. The amendment was proposed by the Congress on December 9, 1803, and was ratified by the requisite three-fourths of state legislatures on June 15, 1804. The new rules took effect for the 1804 presidential election and have governed all subsequent presidential elections.

Under the original rules of the Constitution, each member of the Electoral College cast two electoral votes, with no distinction made between electoral votes for president and electoral votes for vice president. The presidential candidate receiving the greatest number of votes—provided that number equaled a majority of the electors—was elected president, while the presidential candidate receiving the second-most votes was elected vice president. In cases where no individual won a vote from a majority of the electors, as well as in cases where multiple individuals won votes from a majority of electors but tied each other for the most votes, the House of Representatives would hold a contingent election to select the president. In cases where multiple candidates tied for the second-most votes, the Senate would hold a contingent election to select the vice president. The first four presidential elections were conducted under these rules.

The experiences of the 1796 and 1800 presidential elections – showing that the original system caused the election of a President and Vice-President who were political opponents of each other, constantly acting at cross-purposes – spurred legislators to amend the presidential election process, requiring each member of the Electoral College to cast one electoral vote for president and one electoral vote for vice president. Under the new rules, a contingent election is still held by the House of Representatives if no candidate wins a presidential electoral vote from a majority of the electors, but there is no longer any possibility of multiple candidates winning presidential electoral votes from a majority of electors. The Twelfth Amendment also lowered the number of candidates eligible to be selected by the House in a presidential contingent election from five to three, established that the Senate would hold a contingent election for vice president if no candidate won a majority of the vice presidential electoral vote, and provided that no individual constitutionally ineligible to the office of president would be eligible to serve as vice president.

Remember, President Trump has said he WON and he hasn’t backed down:

I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 7, 2020

Does this look like a many ready to concede?

Nope!

And from CNBC:

He then offered an answer to the question many have been asking: What if Trump refuses to ever concede?

“He may never concede; he doesn’t have to concede,” Yoo said. “The thing about the American Constitution is that it doesn’t actually require the sitting president to do anything one way or the other. On January 20th, Donald Trump’s term ends and Joe Biden’s, I believe, will begin.”

QZ.com confirms how the 12th Amendment works:

States allow the popular vote to determine the appointment of electors, but Trump and his allies could use friendly state legislatures and governors to send alternate—or in the case of states with Republican legislatures and Democratic governors, additional—electors. When the electoral college convenes on Dec. 14, states with competing electors would cast double their allotted votes, forcing Senate president Mike Pence to figure out what to do with the doubled-up votes. If Pence threw out the extra votes and neither candidate hit 270, the decision goes to the House. There, each state delegation gets one vote; currently, in 27 states, a majority of delegates are Republican.

(For a trip down memory lane: Back in 2000, Florida’s Republican legislature was on the cusp of appointing new electors to vote for Bush as the court-ordered recount dragged on. The SCOTUS decision rendered that preparation moot. Also, in 1876, states sent competing electoral college delegations and after Congress failed for months to agree on which was valid, a last-minute deal was struck that made Rutherford B. Hayes president as long as he agreed to end Reconstruction.)

And from TheConversation.com:

Congress will open and record the votes of the Electoral College in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021. But this time when, as per the 12th amendment of the US Constitution, “the President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates,” the procedure may not be a simple formality. Because each house is controlled by a different party, each may approve their own list, or both houses may reject the electors from some states. The legal framework is so vague that no one outcome can be certain.

In case of a tie, the 12th Amendment states that “the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President” and that “the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote”. As things stand, this method of adding up state representations rather that the individual votes of the 435 representatives would give the Republicans a majority to reelect their candidate. But everything hinges on the elections in the House and Senate, also on November 3, since the final decision would be up to the members of the new Congress, to be installed on January 3, 2021. Incidentally, the current Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, is an unparalleled strategist who has already mapped the districts the Democrats must win on November 3 in order to have not only a seat majority but also a majority of blue states in the House of Representatives.

Here is even more on the history and working of the 12th Amendment, from the ConstitutionCenter.org:

The Twelfth Amendment cannot be understood outside of the Electoral College, which was set out in the 1787 Constitution as the mechanism by which Americans select their presidents.

There were four crucial aspects of that mechanism. The first was that the electors would vote for two persons (at least one of whom had to be from outside the elector’s home state). The second was that the electors did not differentiate between the two persons as potential presidents or vice presidents. Electors should simply vote for the two persons they viewed as most qualified to become president. The person gaining the most votes (if a majority) would become president. The runner-up (presumably the second-most-qualified person) would become vice president. The third assumption was that the electors—at least following the completely predictable (and unanimous) election of George Washington as our first president—would quite often fail to reach majority approval of a specific candidate; in that case, according to the original Constitution, the decision would be made by the House of Representatives, with each state’s delegation having one vote. The Constitution also provided that the House would choose in case of a tie vote between two candidates each of whom had received a majority of votes. Finally, because the Constitution, until amended in 1933, provided that newly elected representatives would meet for the first time only a full year after election, the choice would be made by a House that would likely include a number of “lame-ducks,” including representatives who had been defeated in the recent elections. All of these features were on display in 1801.

The election of 1800 was one of the most important in American history and, arguably, even in world history, for it represented the first time that an incumbent leader was defeated in an election. The incumbent was John Adams, who had been Washington’s Vice President for two terms and was then elected in his own right in 1796. His Vice President was Thomas Jefferson. This result reflects the desire of the Framers of 1787 to avoid development of political parties and focus indeed on some notion of “best men.” Any such hopes were quickly frustrated, however. Even by 1796, Adams was associated with the Federalist Party, while Jefferson was supported by the Democratic-Republican Party. They ran against each other again in 1800, and both Adams and Jefferson had “running mates,” Charles Cotesworth Pinckney from South Carolina in the case of Adams (and the Federalist Party) and Aaron Burr of New York, for Jefferson. The Federalist Party electors figured out that it was important not to cast both of their votes for Adams and Pinckney, for that would create a tie and, if both got a majority of the vote, throw the election into the House; the Democratic-Republican electors were not so sagacious. They dutifully cast both of their votes for their party’s champions, creating a tie majority vote that forced the House to choose between Jefferson and Burr.

The tie vote exposed deep problems in the 1787 system. The one-state/one-vote rule had the practical effect of giving Delaware’s sole Representative Bayard, an ardent Federalist, the same voting power as Virginia, then the largest state (and home, of course, of Jefferson). And what if a state had an even number of representatives who split evening on their choice? In that case, the state’s vote was not cast at all. Given that there were 16 states in the Union in 1801, nine delegations had to agree on their choice. Only on the 36th ballot did Bayard agree to vote for Jefferson and to break the deadlock (by which time at least two Jeffersonian governors, from Pennsylvania and Virginia, were threatening to call out their state militias and order them to march on the new national capitol in Washington, D.C.). Jefferson was peacefully inaugurated on March 4, and the all-important precedent was set for peaceful transfer of power. Yet the original electoral college system was exposed as problematic, and there was widespread agreement that something had to be done. But what?

One possibility, obviously, was to adopt the suggestion of Pennsylvania’s James Wilson at the Philadelphia Convention that presidents be elected by a national popular vote. That was rejected in 1787 and did not become a serious possibility in the early 19th century (nor, of course, has it been adopted since then). Still, it had become clear that political parties had become a feature of American politics and that the electoral college system should be modified to reflect this. How was this accomplished?

The answer is quite simple: electors would in the future continue to cast two votes (and one of them, as before, would have to be for a non-native of the elector’s home state), but, crucially, one of the two votes would explicitly be to fill the presidency, while the other designated who should become vice president. Never again could presidential candidates and their running mates face the embarrassing kind of tie vote that forced the House to choose between Jefferson and Burr. The Twelfth Amendment was proposed by the Eighth Congress on December 9, 1803 and submitted to the states three days later. There being seventeen states in the Union at that time, thirteen had to ratify it. Secretary of State James Madison declared that the Amendment had been added to the Constitution on September 25, 1804, at which time fourteen of the seventeen states had ratified it. Delaware, Connecticut, and Massachusetts had rejected it (though Massachusetts in fact ratified it in 1961!). The election of 1804 and all subsequent elections were carried out under the terms of the Twelfth Amendment.

SIGN THE PETITION: We Need National Voter ID!

This splitting of the presidency and vice-presidency did not go uncontested. At least two senators expressed their reservations about the quality of vice presidential candidates. Rather than asking of a candidate “Is he capable? Is he honest?”, Delaware’s Senator White suggested that the question instead would be “Can he by his name, by his connections, by his wealth, by his local situation, by his influence, or his intrigues, best promote the election of a President?” Senator Tracy of Connecticut agreed: “Will the ambitious, aspiring candidate for the Presidency, will his friends and favorites promote the election of a man of talents, probity and popularity for Vice President, and who may prove his rival? No! They will seek a man of moderate talents.” One might well ask how often such fears have been realized in our history.

In addition to its implicit recognition of the existence of political parties, the Amendment made another important change: The original Constitution provided that the failure of any candidate to achieve a majority would require the House to choose as president one of the five top-ranking candidates, with the person coming in second to serve as vice-president unless there was tie for second place, in which case the Senate would choose between them. Now, however, the House would choose only the President from the top three choices of the electors; the Senate would now choose the Vice President from the top two choices of the electors for that specific office. Among other things, this guaranteed, in effect, that there would always be a vice president, who could presumably take the reins of the presidency should the House be hopelessly divided among the top three candidates for the presidency.

This aspect of the Twelfth Amendment became crucial in 1824, the only time since 1800 that the House in fact selected the president as the result of the inability of any of the presidential candidates to achieve a majority of electoral votes. Andrew Jackson had won 99, John Quincy Adams 84, William Crawford 41, and Henry Clay 37. Under the original Constitution, the House would have been able to choose among all four, and one might plausibly believe that Clay might have prevailed. Under the Twelfth Amendment, however, Clay was out of the running, and the choice was reduced to Jackson, Adams, and Crawford.

Although no election since 1824 has been decided in the House of Representatives, a shift of relatively few votes in a small number of key states might well have led to that result in 1948, 1968, and 2000. What this means, practically speaking, is that in contemporary America, Wyoming, the smallest state with under 600,000 people, would have the same say in choosing a new president as California, with a population nearly 70 times that of Wyoming. As much to the point, perhaps, it is quite easy to imagine the popular vote winner losing to the runner-up in part because gerrymandered delegations in the House of Representatives voted for their party’s favorite rather than the person who actually received a majority of their state’s popular vote.

Because of the potential disconnect between the popular vote and the result of the electoral vote (or potential vote in the House), there have been recurrent proposals simply to elect the president by popular vote. If, though, one shares any of White’s or Tracy’s concerns about the vice presidency, popular election would not necessarily assuage them if one were forced to vote for the president and vice-president as a single ticket. (Political scientists have determined that voters rarely cast their vote on the basis of the vice presidential candidate.)

One possible reform is to adopt the practice in many states and “unbundle” the election of our two top executive branch officials. That is, just as in many states candidates for governor and lieutenant governor run entirely separate campaigns, meaning that sometimes the governor is from one party and the lieutenant governor from another, one could imagine separate elections for the president and vice president. Even within the electoral college, we could imagine voting for two slates of electors, one charged with choosing the president, the other picking the vice president. Most of the time, of course, voters would pick the slates of the same political party. But one can imagine that at least on occasion voters might be so put off by the vice presidential candidate that they would “split” their ticket. That very possibility might serve to discipline presidential candidates more than is now the case, especially because candidates who win the presidential nomination today basically exercise unlimited discretion in choosing their running mates. This was not the case before the 20th century, when political conventions often exercised real choice in picking both candidates.