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An alternate slate of Republican electors in various state legislatures cast votes for President Trump on Monday in what they claim was a legal process. David Fahrenthold explained the idea behind these votes on Seattle’s Morning News.

“The first thing to know is that these votes have no legal force at all,” Fahrenthold said. “I mean, these people often were people who had been selected to be the electors for President Trump had he won these states. But since he did not, they’re just people. I mean, it’s like you and I getting together to cast electoral votes.”

“So what they’ve said was, well, we’re casting these votes provisionally in the hopes that later on some court authority will say, ‘actually, no, you know, in Georgia, Biden didn’t win Georgia, Trump did,’ and so they’ll count Trump’s electoral votes instead,” he continued. “Their basis is something that happened in Hawaii in 1960 where there was a recount after the electoral votes were cast, and so the Democrat ended up winning. Nothing like that seems likely to happen here. Obviously, Trump has lost again and again in the courts. But to me, it was sort of a way of showing that they’re going to keep the alternative reality going a little bit longer.”

In the Hawaii case, however, the vote did not change the outcome of the presidential race. It also was the government of Hawaii that decided the Democrat won, not just the Democrats in Hawaii asserting on their own authority that they won, Fahrenthold said.

Electoral College makes it official: Biden won, Trump lost

As Dave Ross pointed out, we vote for electors and, by the rules, if a majority of a state’s voters choose a Democrat, then it is the Democratic electors who are voted into be electors. Therefore, if you’re not one of the Democratic electors in that state, you’re not an elector.

“You’re nobody,” Fahrenthold said. “… We talked to election law experts yesterday who said they can send whatever they want to Congress. But by law, Congress is only allowed to consider electoral votes that are electors who were chosen by the operation of state law. And so in every one of these states, that’s the Democrats, because the Democrats have won the election. These Republicans, they may call themselves electors, they may hold a vote, but they’re not operating on any sort of state authority, so they shouldn’t even be considered.”

Listen to the full interview between Dave Ross and David Fahrenthold:

Pulitzer Prize winning reporter David Fahrenthold joins ³ÉÈËXÕ¾ Radio’s Dave Ross every Tuesday on Seattle’s Morning News. Listen to Seattle’s Morning News weekday mornings from 5 – 9 a.m. on ³ÉÈËXÕ¾ Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.