I came across a post in a Michigan community that mentioned this, and i asked if it really happened because it seems so crazy that Republican collaborators would directly mail in fake documents saying Trump won states he lost and I hadn’t even really heard about it.
But this is exactly what happened, as I found out today after looking for more corroborating sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot
Trump republicans in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, Nevada, and New Mexico forged false elector certificates and actually mailed in those forged electoral certificates to the national archives, that were examined and found to be forgeries, with trump, Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman as the ring leaders calling hundreds of Republicans to ask them to directly commit election fraud and forgery.
Some of them said yes. A bunch of them said yes, actually.
Well look at that. Conspiracy to defraud the elections of the United States.
I guess the #GOP was right about election fraud all along, except they were the group doing it & their accusations were just projection.
Yea, stop the steal was real, but being perpetrated by Republicans and conservatives, and Americans and its political institutions actually did stop the steal trump and his campaign officials attempted.
Like straight up. Straight up forgery and electoral fraud, even more direct than that Georgia call.
My head is spinning about it
Keep in mind that their goal was and continues to be discrediting the democratic process. They are willing to give up short term gains for long term power.
They have, imo, successfully convinced enough people that elections cannot be trusted. It’s why we need more and more people to be election officials but the threat of violence against them is making it challenging.
It’s always projection with them. Which is why I wanted to see investigations into some of the states where they won instead of it all being focused where they lost and claimed fraud was happening. Also battleground states they lost but didn’t call fraud on.
Fraud and Forgery are by themselves a Crime (I believe even in the US) even without the whole conspiracy to defraud the elections.
Surelly those who committed them can already be prosecuted and convicted if found guilty?!
It’s definitely a crime and a very serious one. But judges are being threatened and the judiciary was preemptively stacked
I feel like I just learned that Arizona didn’t prosecute anyone either. So it feels like the bad people are learning more about the process and how to cheat better. Pretty fucked.
I was pretty heartened to find out the national archives inspected and then rejected all of the false certificates sent in, so I’m going with the glass half full thing here.
I would have liked some convictions as well, but it looks like Michigan is looking to prosecute people, if I understand correctly. I don’t know. It seems like the whole prosecution of the false elector plot is still going on.
If they aren’t being prosecuted it’s because they have turned state’s evidence against Trump & his crew of stupid #fascists.
Every failed coup d’état is a practice round.
And practice makes perfect.
And Americans are frogs in slowly heating water.
Oh yeah no it was an actual attempted coup. He should probably be executed for it. Instead he’s running again
He should be facing far more serious legal consequences, suffice to say. Rather than this piecemeal, “ooo, maybe we can get him on a technicality” bullshit. If a democracy is incapable of even protecting itself from such a hamfisted coup, how could it hope to protect itself from one orchestrated by a person who isn’t pants on head stupid.
I just wanted to ask, did you happen to get the phrase ‘pants on head stupid’ from zero punctuation back in the day? It’s the only place I’ve ever heard that term before and I still use it all the time
It’s more of a Blackadder thing for me. Him putting underpants on his head and putting pencils up his nostrils to pretend that he’s gone mad.
The problem is that Attorney General Garland, for reasons known only to himself, wanted to wait until after the Jan 6th committee issued its report before turning the full power of the DOJ on prosecuting Trump.
I think he did it for political cover; to avoid the appearance of a political motive; but I think it’s obvious now that it was a mistake both because Trump was always going to claim political persecution regardless, and because they are now in real danger of running out of time.
Aren’t Fraud and Forgery actual crimes in the US?!
The current right wing talking point is its not fraud because it wasn’t successful lol. Even if it was successful, it still wasn’t fraud because trump believed the election was stolen from him. Oh and state legislator can pick any electors they want at anytime.
It’s ridiculous
“That didn’t happen.
And if it did, it wasn’t fraud.
And if it was, it didn’t work.
And if it had, it would be justified.
And if it wasn’t, legislators could elect anyone.
And if they did, we would be right.”Aside from the last line, it fits The Narcissist’s Prayer pretty well.
I didn’t murder him! I only took a contract out on his life! The hitman got arrested before he even hurt the guy! I’m INNOCENT!
The only crimes that aren’t punishable are suicide and coup d’etat… If successful. I guess people forgot that last bit. Too bad there wasn’t more attempted suicide amongst these guys.
Only if you’re poor!
You got me there!
Yes, it’s one of the many things Trump and his collaborators are being prosecuted for.
IANAL, but yeah. And we should push our reps to ensure that the law is applied fairly.
Why would you try to change the subject to sex? Seems a bit weird, but I’m interested
/s
I did it, just for you. /s
Depends on who commits them.
Not when you’ve got good ol religion to burn the country to the ground with.
I remember reading about this; in particular, some fake electors showing up to vote for Trump and being turned away. I was super confused, as a european, because it seemed obvious that this meant that they were impersonating officials.
I asked americans why they hadn’t been arrested. I don’t quite recall the answers, but it was something about them just making a gesture, or just larping. It’s still just weird to me.
All those us shenanigans are quite strange. They seem to be allowed to do pretty much anything with no consequences whatsoever. Apparently the us has no laws governing what republican politicians are allowed to do.
It took them a year to charge only a small percentage of people in a filmed insurrection…
I’ll shit on people all day, especially for the fact that the judges have been extra lenient in those cases, but it’s far from a small percentage. Of the 1265 defendants that have been named, about 460 of them have been sentenced. Still more that need identified, but 120 cases per year over 3 years isn’t anything to sneeze at (laugh, a little, point maybe, but not sneeze).
I think the issue is more with the fact that only 1265 people have been rounded up, that they’ve had an average sentence of a year for an insurrection, and frankly, that they weren’t shot when trying to take the capitol building by force while chanting about lynching elected officials.
The Michigan false electors were indeed criminally charged and they are going through the process now https://michiganadvance.com/2023/12/13/michigan-fake-electors-back-in-court-as-state-elections-director-testifies/
Good to know that my sense of justice is not completely inapplicable to US matters.
Georgia too, they’re all on trial.
They have been arrested and charged and released on their own recognizance which is much cheaper and less onerous than detaining someone who is not a flight risk in jail until they plead or go to trial.
As of now, if memory serves, pretty much all of the fake electors in Michigan have pleaded out for reduced sentences and cooperation agreements. There are some in Georgia who are still holding out to go to trial, but that’s a completely different case brought by the state as opposed to by the federal government.
You really need to be careful about believing everything you read on Lemmy, especially when it comes to legal information.
Let’s just say that if there were a Lemmy Bar Association, you wouldn’t even have to be particularly literate in order to pass the exam and become a member. Lemmy’s idea of US law is basically whatever some rando thinks makes sense. It’s pretty comical sometimes.
You really need to be careful about believing everything you read
on Lemmynearly anywhere on the internet.Too many people decide to not vote on entirely skewed cherry-picked drip-drip-drip, downright false often without any fact-checking except a tummy sense of truthiness. That’s how we get these passive hordes staying at home fondling their purity on Election Day, “bOtH pArTiEs ArE tHe SaMe LoL aMiRitE”.
Lemmy is basically Reddit without a profit motive. The same idiocy that was at home on Reddit is found here, perhaps in slightly lower abundance.
Remember the projection: if they thought this would work, it would absolutely work on the old stinky orange.
Has anyone tried just handing him some papers requesting to be removed from all ballots and seeing if he’ll sign them? I think if you gave him a really cool pen with a BIG space to sign he would go for it. If you called him ‘sir’ in the process he’d probably brag about it later.
Brilliant!
This would definitely work
Like nobody would notice the difference or double-check the numbers. “Oh, I guess he did win after all. I could’ve sworn he didn’t, but this document here says he did, so that’s that.”
I think that’s why if I heard rumblings about this before, I didn’t clock it as so monumental because what happened is so absurd.
Trump is guilty of insurrection and rape, and those are a couple flagpole reasons in my head that he shouldn’t be any sort of political candidate, but he also directly committed electoral fraud in that Georgia phone call and apparently directed Republicans to mail in forged election certificates.
It’s just so crazy that I didn’t think he and his campaign committed straight up, direct electoral forgery and electoral fraud in multiple states, which they apparently did.
“The bigger the lie”, I guess.
It was a multi-prong attack. The goal was to generate uncertainty in the validity of results certified by the states, and create a justification for Mike Pence to delay certification.
Run a search on
mike pence delay certification fake electorsand take your pick.Yes. Although “multi-prong attack” makes it sound like they were somewhat competent when in fact the whole thing was a gross charade of competence performed by the most idiotic dipshits god ever mistakenly crapped out on the earth. And even then it’s still all this.
Being unable to carry out your plot doesn’t absolve you from guilt. The intention was clearly there and that’s all that matters. The people in charge were trying to commit a coup and disregard the democratic process.
Make no mistake, they had a very complex plan to seize power and it nearly worked. Had Mike Pence played ball there’s a very real chance they would’ve succeeded and it would’ve ended up going to SCOTUS who’d stop any recounts ala Bush v. Gore circa 2000. This wasn’t a one-off plan, this is the rightwing plot hatched by shadowy billionaire-funded thinktanks, remember their fascination with George Soros? They’ll try again. America is in very real danger.
All the ringleaders are traitors and should be made examples of, they should all swing.
isn’t this mail fraud?
Ah, but you see they are white Christian conservative Republicans.
So, no.
Hypothesis: All Trump news stories are always worse.
Result: True
Does that mean we get to storm the Capitol building too?
“Mom says it’s my turn to commit an act of treason against the United States!”
Two insurrections don’t make a patriotism.
Tell that to the Republicans
You know, I did. You’re not going to believe this, but they refused to engage in critical reasoning. Weird.
Ah yes… “We’re going to trick NARA into thinking that we actually won the election. It’s not like it’s an entire agency made up of the most pedantic motherfuckers on the planet or anything.”
Narrator: “NARA is in fact an entire agency made up of the most pedantic motherfuckers on the planet.”
The republican traitor filth must be crushed.
The states really are falling apart before our eyes aren’t they
I don’t think I’d say that, I think the fact that all of the false certificates were immediately flagged and rejected is a good sign.
I think it’s a lot more odd that the matter isn’t being treated more seriously by the authorities, but I wouldn’t say that some recent development indicating a collapse, the aw, shucks recognition of “oh they were just trying” seems oddly within the American tradition.
Maybe falling apart was a bit much but there’s some glaring cracks that can no longer be ignored. Hopefully they can be addressed before it comes to that.
I have a sizable faith in the human capacity to ignore, but I also hope that these issues are paid attention to and attempts are made to remedy at least some of the failures of the US political and electoral system.
It’s there an active Michigan community? It’s one of the few subs I still visit in Reddit
I have no idea how active the community actually is, I was just scrolling on by, so maybe I just stumbled upon that story
If this is actual novel research/data aggregation that you’ve done, sounds like maybe you should contact a journalist or media outlet that you trust.
This fraud has been known about and even covered fairly well by some news outlets. For example, check out the CNN special report, Trumping Democracy An American Coup, for a lot of details surrounding it and other aspects of Trump’s attempts to retain power. It’s been a while since I saw it, but if I recall correctly, a really cool thing about this report is that all/most of the politicians interviewed are Republicans. i.e. It’s not just a Democrat-spun narrative.
What surprises me is the fact of how little this was actually broadcasted. There was thousands of reports on MSNBC and CNN about how there was claims to be election fraud, but generally it was covering the other side saying it was done to them not actual evidence showing that they did the fraud.
I blame entertainment news as the reasoning for it, they had been much more apt to cover the international conflicts then what’s happening domestically because it’s attracting more viewers
I don’t think it is, I just read a couple articles and then found the Wikipedia page.
I think other people knew about it, but for some reason aren’t making this as known as it should be. Or perhaps the American political process is not understood well or broadly enough that direct forgery and fraud isn’t making the impact it should when the story is reported on?
I am confused as to why this is not a bigger story or a headline that the Democrats are running with, maybe because there haven’t been any convictions related to this yet?
But thanks for bringing that up, I want to look into that and which media I should contact.
Because more people should be reporting this.
My $.02: media companies are interested in perpetuating the political horse race, because it is good for ad sales, so they softball a lot of the really heinous shit, so he looks at least something a normal-ish politician to large swaths of the American electorate who blindly consume their TV news.
A significant portion of them are also owned by right wing companies. Give it a Google.
This is absolutely the case. Also the head of all the corporate news sewer factories are all republiQan so. Y’know. They lie, cheat, steal. Etc.
Could play a part. I definitely have to look more into why this is not being reported even as much as the Georgia telephone call was reported, which I also don’t think was covered heavily enough.
It was reported on years ago.
