The five Republican “fake electors” in New Mexico who falsely claimed Donald Trump won the state in the 2020 presidential election will not be “subject to criminal prosecution under current state law” despite engaging in a plot to “undermine democracy,” the state’s attorney general said on Friday. Democrat Raúl Torrez’s office began looking into the case in 2023 after a referral to federal investigators the previous year failed to determine whether the pro-Trump officials acted illegally. They found that Trump’s campaign team gave the fake certificate and submission instructions to the alternate electors, but according to the Associated Press, the New Mexico administrators said the document was filed in the case that they were later deemed as duly-elected–something only relevant if Trump had emerged victorious in any of the dozens of legal challenges he made against states just after the election. Because of this contingency, Torrez requested in a 29-page report that Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and the Democratic-controlled legislature change state election rules to allow his office “greater latitude to prosecute these types of cases in the future,” including considering falsely acting as a presidential elector a crime and expanding the types of falsified election documents banned.
