Explainer: What is the Trump ‘fake elector’ scheme and why is it in the news?

The special committee of the US House of Representatives, which investigated the January 6th attack on the US Capitol, found that the violence on that day was only one part of an overarching conspiracy aimed at overturning the result of the 2020 presidential election.

It concluded that one key element of this plan by Donald Trump and his allies to remain in power involved manipulating the system that is technically used for electing the president – the electoral college.

This became known as the “the fake elector” scheme.

Trump’s supporters have contended, on the other hand, that the January 6th committee was partisan in that it was made up mainly of Democrat politicians.

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In recent days the issue of the “fake elector” scheme took another turn when the attorney general in the state of Michigan announced that 16 people would face felony charges over their alleged involvement. Some of the charges have penalties of up to 14 years in prison on conviction.

The group included a member of the Republican national committee and a former co-chair of the Republican Party in Michigan.

In essence the authorities in Michigan are claiming that there was an orchestrated scheme to have the state officially back Trump as the winner of the election even though voters had opted for his rival, Joe Biden.

[ Trump target letter and Michigan prosecutions suggest investigation into aftermath of 2020 election getting wider ]

How could this happen? Surely the US is a democracy?

Under the US Constitution, the public votes every four years to determine who should be the president. However, the occupant of the White House is not determined by who wins the popular vote nationwide. A candidate can win more votes across the country and still lose. The winner of the presidency is decided by what is known as the electoral college.

How does this work?

When Americans turn up at the polls to vote for president, they are actually voting for their chosen candidate’s group of electoral college electors in their state. This group, known as a slate of electors, are generally picked in advance by the candidate’s political party.

In most states the candidate who wins the popular vote for the presidency sends their slate of electors to vote in the electoral college on a winner-takes-all basis.

The electoral college consists of 538 electors, with the number for each state determined by the number of representatives and senators it has in Congress. A total of 270 electoral college votes is required to elect the president.

[ Donald Trump under investigation for civil rights conspiracy in Capitol attack inquiry ]

So what was the ‘fake electors’ scheme?

After the 2020 election Trump claimed there had been widespread fraud and contested Biden’s victory. In some key battleground states, such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, false certificates were submitted to the electoral college declaring Trump had won.

In Michigan the attorney general has contended that the 16 people charged signed their names to multiple certificates stating they were the “duly elected and qualified electors for president and vice-president of the United States” for the state.

“These false documents were then transmitted to the US Senate and national archives in a co-ordinated effort to award the state’s electoral votes to the candidate of their choosing, in place of the candidates actually elected by the people of Michigan,” the state attorney general said.

Why would they do that?

The January 6th committee of the House of Representatives maintained in its report that Trump and his allies anticipated that if there were conflicting electoral college slates of electors, each declaring a different person had won their state, the vice-president when chairing the congressional process to formally certify the result could refuse to count the genuine votes.

The issue of who would be president would, under the legal theory promoted by some of Trump’s supporters, go back to individual state legislatures, many of whom were controlled by Republicans. In their view this would allow Trump to remain in power.

However, on January 6th vice-president Mike Pence maintained he did not have powers to block the certification by Congress of the electoral college votes. Biden was declared president.