Nearly a sixth of Donald Trump’s fake electors are back as his 2024 electors in key swing states. Several others are still in positions of political power across the country — despite criminal indictments and other efforts to hold them accountable.
Of the 82 slated Republican electors in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, 14 people who took part in Trump’s scheme to overturn legitimate results in 2020 are listed among Republicans’ representatives to the Electoral College this election cycle.
“We have certainly not seen sufficient accountability for the individuals who masterminded this effort,” said Jessica Marsden, counsel at the nonprofit group Protect Democracy, which fights attacks on the U.S. democratic process.
“The fact that the Republican Party is going back to these individuals, despite their participation in the scheme to overturn the 2020 election, is yet another indication that the party has not repudiated the efforts to overthrow the election. In fact, in many ways, it is doubling down on it — starting with nominating former President Trump as their standard-bearer.”
Two of Nevada’s six electors took part in the scheme, including the state’s longtime GOP chairman, Michael McDonald, who also became a Trump campaign senior adviser over the summer. In Michigan, six of those who participated in the 2020 plot are listed as Republican electors.
In Pennsylvania, five of its 19 GOP electors went along with Trump’s plan last time around. The illegitimate electors there and in New Mexico operated with additional legal cover because they added a conditional clause to their certificates saying the documents would only be valid if a court recognized Trump as the lawful winner, making it more difficult to prosecute electors in those two states. One of the fake electors in New Mexico is listed as an elector in this election.
Two swing states stand out among the rest for taking accountability measures to prevent the fake electors from being put forward as electors this year: Arizona and Wisconsin.
In Arizona, the state’s attorney general criminally indicted those who went along with Trump’s plan to send illegitimate paperwork to Congress in the hopes that senators would interrupt the certification process on Jan. 6, 2021. None of those 11 fake electors — who include two state representatives, the executive director of the state’s Republican Party and an executive at the conservative Turning Point USA — made it to the list this time.
The same is true in Wisconsin, where a progressive law firm joined forces with the Georgetown University Law Center to sue all 10 fake electors there and won, scoring a settlement in which they all agreed to publicly state that President Joe Biden was the true winner — and promised they wouldn’t serve as Trump’s electors ever again.
“We foresaw in Wisconsin that if we didn’t do something, the same actors might show up and do it again,” said Scott Thompson, lead attorney on the case for the law firm Law Forward.
“The proof is in the pudding. These people cannot be electors this time around,” he added. “Our case was always about accountability and transparency. We wanted to make sure that there was frankly a cost associated with trying to undermine Wisconsin’s democracy — really the United States’ democracy.”
That said, a number of the 2020 fake electors remain in trusted positions this election, even if they’re not electors again — including in Wisconsin.
Fake elector Robert F. Spindell Jr. continues to sit on the Wisconsin Elections Commission, where his stated goal is to be “insuring [sic] that voters have confidence in the outcome of our elections.” His current term doesn’t end until 2026.
In Michigan, Stanley T. Grot was criminally indicted by the state’s attorney last year along with his fellow fake electors. But he has so far ignored calls to resign as clerk of the affluent northern Detroit suburb of Shelby Township, where he is still tasked with maintaining the local voter registration files and will be administering this year’s federal, state and local elections in November. Another fake elector, Michele Lundgren, is a long-shot candidate for a Michigan state House seat in the Detroit area.
In Georgia, fake elector Burt Jones became the state’s lieutenant governor after continuing to question the validity of the 2020 results and receiving support from Trump, who called him a “conservative warrior” who would “get to the bottom of the Nov. 3 presidential election scam.”
Also in Georgia, fake elector David Shafer was indicted alongside Trump last year by the Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, whose racketeering case is now on hold.
He has embraced his new identity: changing his Twitter profile picture to his Fulton County Jail booking photo, asserting that his efforts were “perfectly legal” and urging people to watch a known conspiracy theorist’s latest Trump movie that features “re-creations” of a supposed Democratic “legal war-room where the criminal plots against Trump are hatched.” Shafer remains the Georgia Republican Party’s “chairman emeritus.”
None of the 2020 fake electors mentioned by name in this story responded to requests for comment.
Though Congress made changes to the way electoral votes are counted and certified to try to prevent what happened in 2020, concerns remain about both what will happen in the period after the vote in this election — and whether those who attempted to change the results last time have been fully held to account.
Thompson stressed the importance of ensuring that those who took part in Trump’s attempted power grab are locked out of the decision-making process this time.
“There are different levels of culpability across the board. But it is problematic when anyone who doesn’t operate as though our democracy has value is still participating in some fashion with authority,” he said.
—
Jose Pagliery and Byron Tau are reporters at NOTUS.