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.
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.