Freedom Caucus leader wants NC to preemptively award electoral votes to Trump
This story was updated to add new information.
A Maryland Republican who leads a right-wing coalition in Congress says North Carolina’s legislature should consider awarding Electoral College votes to former President Donald Trump before citizens’ votes are counted, according to Politico.
Rep. Andy Harris, the chairman of the Freedom Caucus, made the comments at a dinner on Thursday, saying the idea “makes a lot of sense” because the western part of the state, a rural area where Trump is popular, is still dealing with the impact of Hurricane Helene.
“You statistically can go and say, ‘Look, you got disenfranchised in 25 counties. You know what that vote probably would have been,’” Harris said in a video posted on Twitter. “Which would be — if I were in the legislature — enough to go, ‘Yeah we gotta convene the legislature. We can’t disenfranchise the voters.’”
Harris said the following in a statement: “Yesterday’s theoretical conversation has been taken out of context. As I’ve repeatedly said, every legal vote should be counted. Currently, voting is going well in western North Carolina.”
North Carolina’s State Board of Elections voted unanimously across party lines earlier this month to approve emergency measures to make it easier for victims of Hurricane Helene in 13 counties to vote.
“These measures were put in place to ensure the victims of Helene can vote in the upcoming election and provide election officials in the hardest hit areas the tools they need to conduct a secure election under extraordinarily difficult conditions," Karen Brinson Bell, the board's executive director, said in a statement at the time.
'Profoundly antidemocratic'
North Carolina is a battleground state with 16 electoral votes that could decide the presidential election. Trump leads Vice President Kamala Harris by between 1 and 2 percentage points in North Carolina state polls, according to FiveThirtyEight.
“It’s profoundly antidemocratic to take the right to vote for president away from the people,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School who worked for the Department of Justice under Barack Obama and as a voting rights advisor for Joe Biden. “It seems like an idea prompted by panic, rather than allowing the people to express their voice.”
Levitt said in order for a state legislature to award electoral votes in lieu of the voters, that legislature would have to pass a law and have the governor sign it. North Carolina has Republican supermajorities in both houses of the legislature and a Democratic governor. Levitt said it’s unlikely a majority of lawmakers in North Carolina would support such an initiative.
Under the federal Electoral Count Reform Act, changes to election laws need to be made before Election Day in order for them to be in effect. And early voting in North Carolina started a week ago.
“It’s questionably constitutional,” Levitt said. “And it’s never going to happen.”
Harris responded in a Friday press conference. “America deserves to have leaders who respect the importance of one of the pillars and foundations of our democracy, which is free and fair elections, and that they are not manipulated by elected leaders for the sake of their own political future or their own political strategy for how they themselves want to succeed," she said.
How North Carolina's electoral votes are awarded
In the Tarheel State, after the election is complete, the State Board of Elections performs a canvass and then issues a certificate of election. Then the secretary of state notifies the governor which party’s electors, Republican or Democrat, have been chosen by the voters.
"If I were to get a call about switching electors, I mean, I wouldn’t do it," Secretary of State Elaine Marshall told Paste BN earlier this month. "There is no authority for that. And it’s just not going to happen on my watch."
Once he has the information from the secretary of state, Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, will be responsible for preparing certificates of ascertainment declaring the winner of the presidential race.
Then the secretary of state will convene the Electoral College to cast votes on Dec. 17 so that the new Congress can meet Jan. 6 to count every state’s electoral votes.
Contributing: Bart Jansen