Five Pennsylvania Republicans who took part in the 2020 Trump campaign’s attempts to overturn the presidential election results will serve as electors again this year, according to a report in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Some told the newspaper they might scheme against the election results again.
William Bachenberg, Bernadette Comfort, Ash Khare, Patricia Poprik, and Andrew Reilly were among the 20 people who submitted themselves as Pennsylvania electors in 2020 to cast votes for former president Donald Trump, despite the fact that Joe Biden won the state’s popular vote.
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They were chosen by their state party again this year, along with 14 others, to cast Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral college votes if Trump wins—and, possibly, if he doesn’t.
“I will stand on what I did in 2020,” Reilly, a Republican National Committee member, told the Inquirer. Poprik, the chair of the Bucks County GOP, also said she be willing to sign a document like the one she and the other Pennsylvania Republicans who offered themselves as alternate electors sent to Congress in 2020.
Pennsylvania‘s purported Republican alternate electors for Trump were unique—and avoided legal blowback—because they said they were only putting themselves forward in the event a court overturned the state’s election results. That never happened.
This set them apart from more aggressive attempts to interfere with election certification in Michigan, Georgia, New Mexico, and Arizona, where dozens were charged for roles in trying to submit fraudulent certificates claiming Trump won the electoral college in those states.
Trump’s then-Vice President, Mike Pence, refused to recognize the false slates; Congress has since tightened rules to prevent election interference, such as raising the number of House and Senate members required to object to a state’s electors and requiring states to certify their election results six days before presidential electors case their votes.
But even some Pennsylvania electors who are new to the job this year told the Inquirer they would join in on another attempt to offer the GOP slate as alternate electors if Trump sows doubt about the election result like he did in 2020.
“If President Trump felt the same way, I’m very open to a process so people have the right to look further into something if they felt it was something that was unfair,” Jim Worthington, a new elector, told the newspaper.
In fact, the Inquirer said just one of this year‘s GOP electors who spoke to the paper was prepared to rule out such a move.
“We’re in a situation where Republicans are saying, ‘Heads I win, tails you lose,’” political scientist Brendan Nyhan told the Inquirer. “They demand the legitimacy of their wins be accepted, and reject the legitimacy of elections in which they’re defeated. That’s not a stable position for democracy.”
