6 August 2024
A speculation:
What if Harris wins the popular vote.
What if republicans in control of some swing counties refuse to certify the election result?
With a Democratic win, MAGA county auditors refuse to certify their county votes claiming Democrats committed election fraud.
The state cannot certify the election either in those states.
Court cases ensue. First the county courts (this may not be needed), the state court, the state supreme court, the federal supreme court (where surely trump will win with the current MAGA members in charge).
But how long will this take?
The election is on November 5. The new congress sits on January 3. Certification day for the presidential electors is January 6. Inauguration day is January 20.
How long will each case at each level of court take? Let’s go back and look at Nixon v. united states. This is touted as one case that really astonished people of the day as at how fast it was decided. May 31, 1974, the lower court ruled against Nixon on the release of his oval office tapes and he appealed to the supreme court. I don’t know exactly when the filing happened, but the oral argument was on 8 July the decision on 24 July. From lower court decision to the extremely quick supreme court decision was almost two months.
Let’s adjust the timeline in these voter certification cases to a generous one month per court—half the Nixon v US timeline. One month per court beginning on 5 November that is three courts, three months in our timeline, we are in February. I suspect this will be later since the results, the lack of certification, and the court filings, briefs and oral arguments, will take some time. Add to this the time it would take to organize the certification of the votes after the cases are decided and then the inauguration, we are into early March. More likely much later.
But what does this mean in actuality?
Biden remains president until the court cases can be sorted out. There is a provision in the constitution that congress decides if there is a tie. This provishavehavecks in when none of the candidates has a majority of the electoral college votes, but this scenario is not a tie because not all the votes will be available to decide. The Senate would have to table the counting of the votes until some clear court direction on which votes were valid was established. I find this hilarious since the whole point of republicans placing MAGAs in these counties was to give trump the win even if they lost the actual vote. Woops.
But it gets worse for them.
Let’s say Harris wins the popular vote and democrats also take control of both houses of congress. The congressional vote is not affected much by the MAGA people, assuming the states allow any democratic popular vote to stand.
Democratic congress, Biden still president?
The new congress immediately, January 3rd increases the number of the supreme court, Biden signs this into law. The democratic senate immediately confirms the new justices.
All bets are off on the supreme court ruling on who won the election.
Since history shows that republicans are more likely in the trump republican party to cheat at elections and the fact that election “audits” done for the 2016 election found that Biden actually won more popular votes than had originally been attributed to him chances are any investigation into the MAGAs lack of certification in the suspect counties will result in a Harris win. We end up with a democratic government and a supreme court that would then allow for enforceable ethics policy applied to itself and term limits.
In conclusion:
As I have said many times in the trump era, republicans are the worst I have ever seen for not understanding there are consequences of their actions. They would be better off letting trump lose, let the democrats rebalance the court, and work to have policy–not cult–as their goals.
Hark 