But they won't be the ones to certify the election.
Remember, the 12th amendment stipulates, "The votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote."
With more Republican-controlled legislatures than Democratic, this means Trump can legitimately lose both the popular vote as he did four years ago and the electoral college, securing re-election.
There is already a precedent for this.
In the 1876 election that pitted Republican Rutherford B. Hayes against Democrat Samuel Tilden, Tilden clinched the popular vote but was one vote shy of the requisite electoral votes.
As Ohio Republican Congressman James Monroe (no relation to our fifth president) published in The Atlantic in October 1893, "The votes of Florida, Louisiana, Oregon, and South Carolina, with an aggregate of 22 electors" would decide the election.
That election happening in the midst of Reconstruction, federal soldiers occupied the three southern states.
Ku Klux Klan presence was also heavy in all four states.
Congressional Democrats claimed soldiers intimidated and suppressed the votes of Southern Democratic voters.
With the threat of re-igniting the Civil War that had only concluded 11 years before, Republicans and Democrats hammered out a backroom deal to hand the presidency to Hayes if he agreed to withdraw Union soldiers from the South.
He did.
He was made president, thus ending Reconstruction.
Judging how this primary season has gone, it isn't inconceivable for Republican-controlled states to revive the "three-to-five million illegal voters" lie Trump screamed about in 2016.
With the pandemic making in-person voting dangerous, could we reasonably argue Republicans are also weaponizing the virus to suppress voter turnout?
It's a dark scenario, but maybe that's why they're so reluctant to provide the necessary relief we should have received by now.
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich recently published a piece titled "Donald Trump's re-election playbook: 25 ways he'll lie, cheat and abuse his power."
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