Trump fake electors plot
Based on Wikipedia: Trump fake electors plot
The Plot to Steal an Election with Fake Paperwork
"I'm just not going to leave," Donald Trump told an aide after losing the 2020 presidential election. "We're never leaving. How can you leave when you won an election?"
He hadn't won. But that didn't stop him and his associates from hatching one of the most audacious schemes in American political history: creating fake electoral certificates to claim he had.
This wasn't a legal challenge or a recount request. This was forgery on a national scale, involving Republican officials in seven states who signed documents falsely declaring that Trump had won their states' electoral votes. The certificates were designed to look official. They were meant to confuse. And they came dangerously close to working.
How American Elections Actually Work
To understand why this scheme was so dangerous, you need to understand how the Electoral College functions. When Americans vote for president, they're technically voting for a slate of electors pledged to their preferred candidate. Each state has a number of electors equal to its congressional representation. Win a state, and your electors cast the official votes.
On a designated day in December, these electors meet in their state capitals and sign certificates recording their votes. These certificates are then sent to Congress, where they're counted on January 6th. The Vice President presides over this counting as a ceremonial duty. It's supposed to be a formality.
Trump and his allies saw it as an opportunity.
The Birth of the Scheme
The day after the November 3rd election, while votes were still being counted, the plan was already taking shape. White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows received a text message calling for an "aggressive strategy" where Republican-led state legislatures would "just send their own electors" to vote for Trump. The message reportedly came from Rick Perry, Trump's own Secretary of Energy.
By November 5th, Roger Stone was dictating messages arguing that "any legislative body" with "evidence of fraud" could choose their own electors. That same day, Donald Trump Jr. texted Meadows with remarkable bluntness:
"It's very simple. We have multiple paths. We control them all. We have operational control. Total leverage. Moral high ground. POTUS must start second term now."
The next day, Congressman Andy Biggs of Arizona asked Meadows about efforts to encourage Republican legislators to send "alternate slates of electors." Meadows replied with three words: "I love it."
The Architect
Enter Kenneth Chesebro, a Harvard-educated attorney who would become the intellectual architect of the plot. On November 18th, Chesebro sent a memo to Jim Troupis, a lawyer representing the Trump campaign in Wisconsin, laying out the general strategy.
His approach was deceptively simple. Have Trump supporters in states Biden won gather on December 14th, the official date when electors cast their votes. Have them sign documents claiming to be the real electors. Make the documents look as official as possible. Then send them to Washington.
Chesebro followed up with more detailed memos in December, providing exact formats for the fake certificates and state-by-state instructions. He acknowledged that this conflicted with the Electoral Count Act, a federal law governing how electoral votes are counted, but argued the law was unconstitutional anyway.
The memos made their way to Rudy Giuliani, Trump's personal attorney, and John Eastman, a conservative law professor. What began as a legal theory became a nationwide operation.
The Pence Card
The fake certificates alone weren't enough. They needed someone in a position of power to accept them as legitimate.
That's where Vice President Mike Pence came in.
Eastman developed a legal theory, documented in what became known as the Eastman memos, arguing that the Vice President had the constitutional authority to reject official electoral certificates and accept alternate ones instead. Or, at minimum, to delay the count and send the decision back to state legislatures.
This theory had no basis in constitutional law or historical precedent. The Vice President's role in counting electoral votes is ceremonial, not discretionary. But Eastman and Chesebro pressed forward, and the strategy became known as "the Pence Card."
Trump pressured Pence relentlessly. On the morning of January 6th, 2021, Trump called Pence and reportedly called him a vulgar name when Pence refused to go along with the scheme. Later that day, during his rally near the White House, Trump told the crowd that Pence had the power to overturn the election.
Minutes before Pence was to certify the election results, a senator's chief of staff attempted to hand him a list of the fraudulent electors.
Pence refused to use it.
The Seven States
The fake elector scheme targeted seven battleground states that Biden had won: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In each state, groups of Republican officials and Trump supporters gathered on December 14th to sign fraudulent electoral certificates.
The logistics were coordinated from the top. Rudy Giuliani served as what investigators would later call a "central figure," coordinating across all seven states. Mike Roman, Trump's director of election day operations, tracked developments and reported back to campaign attorneys.
Internal communications revealed how blatantly the participants understood what they were doing. Attorney Jack Wilenchik described the strategy in an email as "sending in 'fake' electoral votes to Pence so that 'someone' in Congress can make an objection when they start counting votes." He used the word "fake" repeatedly, then suggested they call them "alternative" instead, adding a smiley face emoji.
In Michigan, one email noted that naming fake electors was proving difficult because the state Capitol was closed due to pandemic restrictions. The conspirators were treating a scheme to overturn democracy like a scheduling problem.
The Hawaii Precedent That Wasn't
Chesebro and others pointed to a 1960 incident in Hawaii to justify their actions. In that year's presidential race between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, Hawaii's results were unclear when the December deadline arrived for electors to cast votes. Both Democratic and Republican slates submitted certificates. After a recount flipped the state to Kennedy, the governor certified the Democratic electors, and Vice President Nixon, presiding over the count, accepted only the post-recount slate.
This, Chesebro argued, showed that alternate slates of electors were permissible.
The comparison falls apart under scrutiny.
In 1960, there was a genuine legal dispute over a close state's results, with a recount underway. The eventual winning slate was certified by the state's own governor. And Nixon himself, when accepting those electors, explicitly stated the incident should not be used as precedent.
In 2020, there were no genuine disputes. Biden had won each targeted state clearly. Courts had rejected Trump's fraud claims dozens of times. No governors certified the fake Trump electors. The alternate slates were part of a coordinated national strategy to overturn a decided election, not a response to genuine uncertainty in a single state.
The participants knew the difference. That's why their certificates carefully avoided language that might subject them to criminal liability, and why they referred to themselves internally as "fake" before settling on "alternate."
A Pressure Campaign
The fake electors scheme was just one prong of a broader assault on democracy. Trump and his allies worked multiple angles simultaneously.
On January 2nd, 2021, Trump, Eastman, and Giuliani held a conference call with roughly 300 Republican state legislators, trying to persuade them to convene special legislative sessions to replace Biden's legitimate electors with Trump's fake ones. They based their arguments on unfounded allegations of election fraud.
Trump pressured the Justice Department to announce it had found evidence of fraud, even though it hadn't. He attempted to install a new acting attorney general, Jeffrey Clark, who had drafted a letter falsely claiming the department had found fraud. The letter was designed to pressure the Georgia legislature to reconsider its electoral votes.
Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, emailed 29 Arizona lawmakers encouraging them to appoint "a clean slate of Electors." She told them the responsibility was "yours and yours alone."
Even the Chair of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, was recruited to help. Trump and Eastman asked her to enlist the committee's assistance in gathering fake electors.
"We're Not Going to Leave"
Perhaps most chilling was the testimony about Trump's state of mind. According to journalist Maggie Haberman, Trump initially seemed to recognize he had lost. He asked advisers what went wrong. He told junior press aides, "I thought we had it," seeming almost embarrassed.
Then something shifted.
"I'm just not going to leave," Trump told one aide. To another: "We're never leaving. How can you leave when you won an election?" He asked McDaniel, "Why should I leave if they stole it from me?"
This was confirmed by Jenna Ellis, a Trump attorney who later testified in Georgia. She recalled Dan Scavino, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, telling her in December 2020 that Trump would refuse to leave office. "The boss is not going to leave under any circumstances," Scavino said. "We are just going to stay in power."
The fake electors weren't just a legal strategy. They were part of a plan to remain in power regardless of what voters had decided.
The Aftermath
The scheme failed. Pence refused to play his assigned role. Congress certified Biden's victory in the early hours of January 7th, after being evacuated during the Capitol riot and then returning to complete its constitutional duty.
But the legal reckoning was only beginning.
By June 2024, dozens of Republican state officials and Trump associates had been indicted in four states for their involvement. Kenneth Chesebro, the scheme's architect, pleaded guilty in Georgia to conspiring to file a false document and received five years of probation. A special counsel investigation examined Trump's role in the events.
Testimony revealed that Trump knew the scheme violated the Electoral Count Act. He knew Eastman's theory was legally dubious. He pushed forward anyway.
The January 6th committee's final report documented how Trump was "driving" the fake elector plan by early December, collaborating with Giuliani on its implementation. Both men were informed that the White House Counsel's Office had concluded the scheme was not legally sound.
They proceeded regardless.
What It Means
The fake electors plot exposed a vulnerability in American democracy that few had previously considered. The system depends on good faith. It assumes participants will accept election results. It relies on the ceremonial nature of certain constitutional roles remaining ceremonial.
Trump and his allies probed these assumptions and found them weaker than expected. A Vice President willing to go along with the scheme might have thrown the country into constitutional crisis. State legislators willing to convene and appoint alternate electors could have created competing claims to legitimacy.
The scheme also revealed how quickly conspiracy can scale. Within days of the election, officials at the highest levels of government were coordinating to subvert its results. Cabinet secretaries, congressmen, the president's own family, party officials across seven states, all worked toward a common goal of keeping Trump in power despite losing.
They created fake documents. They pressured officials. They built elaborate legal theories to justify the unjustifiable. And many of them knew exactly what they were doing, even as they did it.
American democracy survived this test. But the margin was thinner than most people realize, and the vulnerabilities that made the scheme possible remain.