Former President Donald Trump’s GOP electors in Pennsylvania weren’t willing to go all the way in the January 2021 bid by the ex-president’s campaign to overturn election results in as many as seven so-called “swing states.”
As Lancasteronline reports, the bid in the commonwealth hit a snag because the state’s GOP electors hedged the language on their elector ballot certificates to say they’d cast their votes for Trump “only if his election challenges succeeded in the courts.”
In five other states, however, electors signed documents “wrongly declaring a Trump victory as they attempted to cast their states’ electoral votes for Trump,” the news website reports, citing documents obtained by the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit American Oversight.
GOP leaders in Pennsylvania and Nevada balked at going that far in seeking to overturn the 2020 U.S. election of Democrat Joe Biden as president. The bid to overturn the election culminated with the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol building.
As a result of the softer wording on the fake ballots, Trump electors in those two states are likely to be spared the legal trouble potentially facing their counterparts in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin, Lancasteronline reports in its detailed account.
Lancasteronline says the hedged language used in Pennsylvania was insisted upon by Allegheny County Republicans. In the end, Pennsylvania GOP electors said they would cast their votes for Trump only “if, as a result of a final non-appealable court order or other proceeding prescribed by law, we are ultimately recognized as being the duly elected and qualified electors.”
By contrast, Trump supporters in the five other states used identical language that outright declared themselves “the duly elected and qualified electors,” Lancasteronline reports.
The web site quotes state Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s office as saying this insistence upon the hedged language might well spare the Pa. GOP electors from criminal investigation in the case.
“These ‘fake ballots’ included a conditional clause that they were only to be used if a court overturned the results in Pennsylvania, which did not happen,” the office’s statement read. “Though their rhetoric and policy were intentionally misleading and purposefully damaging to our democracy, based on our initial review, our office does not believe this meets the legal standards for forgery.”
