Without including the Supreme Court's thumb on the scale.As the president conflates what he's used to with media calls on election night with actual laws, here is a primer on relevant dates this year https://t.co/9HcEBNxS4u
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) October 27, 2020
“These are legal procedures that have to be followed,” says Lia Merivaki, assistant professor of American Politics at Mississippi State University. “Pushing for the election to be called on election night will create more confusion and will create distrust and ... possibly, many are going to start suing the states because they expect the results to be announced on election night. So it will make the job of election officials and the states harder as they try to keep the process transparent and fair.”
Because no matter what AP says (the default "authority" on TeeVee), the election is not decided until January.
“There's Election Day, where those electors are elected; there's the date in December where the electors meet and then vote for president; and then there's the date in January where the Congress certifies that election,” says Amy Dacey, executive director of the Sine Institute of Policy and Politics at American University.
In addition to the Electoral College, certifying the winner of the presidential election involves the Senate, House of Representatives and the National Archives.
Please note (again), the process does not involve the AP, or any TV network.
Once the 50 states, plus the District of Columbia, tally the in-person, mail-in and provisional ballots, each state governor draws up a list of electors. Copies of this list, known as the Certificate of Ascertainment, are submitted to the U.S. Archivist, the head of the National Archives.
The electors then meet in their state capitals — the District of Columbia’s meet in D.C. — to formally cast their votes for president and vice president. This must occur on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December. This year, that date falls on Dec. 14.
The US National Archives building is shown in Washington, DC, 21 July 2007. The building's main rotunda allows visitors to view…
The electors in each of the states complete Certificates of Vote and send them to the U.S. Senate, the National Archives and state officials. Once that is done, the Electoral College has no further duties until the next presidential election.
The final step in the process occurs on Jan. 6, 2021, when Congress meets to count the electoral votes and officially certify the winner. The process is ordinarily ceremonial, but there can be objections. There were objections to some Electoral College votes in 1969 and 2005, but the House and Senate rejected the objections and the votes in question were counted.
As Laurence Tribe pointed out, if electoral slates are rejected, the tally is determined by the votes remaining, NOT by what could have been. So tossing out votes in the House is not a secret plan to steal the election. And they won't get tossed anyway, unless the GOP somehow wins enough races to take control of the House in January. And those Certificates of Vote are submitted by the state executive, not by the state legislatures. So the legislatures can't go rogue and override the Certificate submitted by their governor. Again, that's where Kavanaugh's "radical" opinion boxes the Court out of overriding the statutes on how elections are conducted.
While it's not covered here, I'll just say again that counting ballots is determined by state law (so long as it doesn't violate the Equal Protection Clause (Bush v. Gore)), and each state has different deadlines for when votes must be received. There is also a federal deadline, which under Bush v Gore (where Kavanaugh drew his "radical" idea) cannot be violated, even for a constitutional remedy (that was the argument of some of the other justices, that the constitutional remedy should override statutory deadlines, but it did not carry the majority). So Kavanaugh's dissent, far from being a rallying cry for usurping the election at all costs, actually boxes the GOP in to a tight corner they can't litigate their way out of. Especially if Biden carries a majority of the electoral college vote and the race doesn't come down to Pennsylvania (which nobody really expects it will).
I'll be glad when it's January 14, 2021. This is exhausting.
And we're really supposed to pretend that the gangsters who came up with that system were wise geniuses,inventing the perfect model of how a republic instead of a monarchy was supposed to work for all of eternity. Phooey. It should be illegal to choose a chief executive by such ridiculous and clearly anti-democratic means. If the concept of legitimate government means anything more than that the results are in accordance with arbitrarily written rules of some ancient congress whose members died two centuries and more ago this would be considered a damnable scheme to never have legitimate governance.
ReplyDeleteThere’s a reason nobody else uses it.
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