How MAGAs May Attempt to Steal the 2024 Election

I’ve covered this before, but here it is briefly:

This election is fundamentally different from the attempted election theft by the MAGAs in 2020. In 2020, the plan was to have Vice President Mike Pence accept a fraudulent slate of electors from various swing states. Basically, ignoring what the people in that state voted for and instead providing electoral votes for Donald Trump. Pence refused to go along with it, and that’s why the MAGAs wanted to hang him.

The current MAGA group understands what went wrong and their manipulation of the current election is less dependent on a single individual and not dependent on the VP or that particular procedure at all. In this election, the idea is to delay in declaring the winner of several key states so that Kamala Harris can’t reach 270 electoral votes before it is too late. When it becomes too late (per the standard procedure), the election would go to the House of Representatives regardless of what anyone in the federal government does. The MAGAs plan to have control of the House of Representatives at that time, allowing them to choose whoever they want as President.

January 6 is the “too late” point. Any state that has not reported the winner of its electoral votes by then is essentially out of play and its electors basically don’t count. If neither candidate has 270 electoral votes on January 6, it goes to the House of Representatives. MAGAs might further frustrate the process at the state level by refusing to confirm the election of new Democrats in order to keep them from being seated in the House before the January 6 election of the President by the House (they would claim that there were voting or ballot irregularities). For the plan to succeed, it is essential that the Republicans control the House of Representatives on January 6.

The Democrats’ response to this has been, predictably, to demand that people “vote harder”. Their theory is that the new MAGA strategy will not work if Harris wins enough states by a wide margin. However, what is more accurate is that the theft becomes more obvious the greater the margin in those states (and we can hope that makes them chicken out); it does not prohibit the new MAGA strategy from working. It also does not address the next election (which could easily be closer) at all, and it does not reflect the fact that the electoral college itself is anti-democratic and strongly favors more conservative candidates (a Democrat must win the popular vote by several percentages to win the electoral college, whereas a Republican can and often does lose the popular vote but still wins the electoral college).

Related: Electoral College Fast Facts

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