To understand how this could work, you have to understand the 12th Amendment of the Constitution. Here’s the key language: “The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote[.]”

I don’t think the Republican plan even requires them to get to a contingent election where the House chooses the president. I think the plan is to steal the Electoral College outright by getting states Trump loses to refuse to certify the results of their election. That’s because the 12th Amendment provides that the president is the person who wins the majority of the “whole number of Electors appointed.” That “whole number” is supposed to be 538. But one potential reading of the amendment is that Trump doesn’t have to win 270 Electoral College votes but just a majority of however many electors show up. Trump’s goal, I believe, is to decrease the number of electors appointed until he wins.

In 2020, Nancy Pelosi was speaker of the House. If states had tried to get cute and not submit their electors by the December 11 deadline, Pelosi would just have extended the deadline. But Speaker Johnson surely won’t. If electors are not submitted by December 11, he’ll likely declare the process “over” and say that the electors appointed by that date are the only ones allowed to vote for president. Crucially, Johnson can do this even if Republicans lose the House and Johnson is removed from power. The new House isn’t sworn in until January 3. As the violent MAGA people in your family already know, January 6 is when the House certifies the results of the Electoral College, but that is just a ceremonial day. By the time we get to January 6, the electors are supposed to have voted. December 11 is the deadline for appointing electors, December 25 the deadline for voting. Mike Johnson will still be in charge on both of those days.

November 5 is the last day of our pretend election. The real election starts on December 11, and Republican officials and judges will have to be forced to honor the results of the pretend election for Harris to have any shot of winning the real one.

increasingly, a broad collection of conspiracy groups, extremist movements, political and commercial interests, and at times hostile states, coalesce around crises to further their agendas through online falsehoods, division and hate. They exploit social media moderation failures, gaming their algorithmic systems, and often produce dangerous real-world effects.

Some of the largest accounts sharing falsehoods about the hurricane response – including those with more than 2 million followers – have actively engaged with other forms of mis- and disinformation and hate. This includes anti-migrant conspiracies, false claims of electoral fraud, and antisemitic discourse around the so-called ‘Great Replacement.’ Their role as amplifiers here reveals how diverse groups converge on moments of crisis to co-opt the news cycle and launder their positions to a wider or mainstream audience.

Falsehoods around hurricane response have spawned credible threats and incitement to violence directed at the federal government – this includes calls to send militias to face down FEMA for the perceived denial of aid, and that individuals would “shoot” FEMA officials and the agency’s emergency responders.

The fundamental failure of Donald Trump’s effort to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election was that it was predicated on complete nonsense. Trump and his attorneys — particularly Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis — seized upon any allegation of fraud or any analysis that presented an opportunity for skepticism about the results and offered them up as valid. Even, in many cases, after it had been made obvious that the claims were not valid.

That the claims were debunked or irrelevant didn’t matter. His supporters treated subsequent claims as more credible in part because they landed in an environment where people were inclined (thanks to that blizzard) to believe that fraud had occurred.

Noting that individual snowflakes were fake was often too slow and too limited to make people realize that, in reality, the sun was shining — that Giuliani was just shaking a box of soap flakes above their window.

Dubious claims from unreliable actors were used to amplify questions about fraud; those questions were then used to present those and subsequent claims as reliable. Ellis was simply one spigot for the misinformation, one who now claims that she did so unconsciously. In representing Trump, she helped add layers to this house of cards.The core problem, again, was that it was almost all nonsense, that almost none of it was credible. But credibility wasn’t the goal, utility was. So lots of useful, false things were offered up, having the effect of making other false things more useful and making those original false things more useful still. Layers upon layers of nonsense. A blizzard in a snow globe held in Donald Trump’s hand.