On December 14, 2020, the duly appointed presidential electors met in states across the country. Joe Biden had won the certified results in seven contested states, but groups of Trump supporters also assembled and signed documents purporting to cast electoral votes for Donald Trump.
The House January 6 committee found that the effort was not simply a symbolic protest. Lawyers and political operatives worked to transmit alternative certificates to federal officials in the hope that they could be used to challenge the real electoral votes during Congress’s January 6 count. The committee described Kenneth Chesebro as an important architect of the plan.
Not all of the documents used identical language. Pennsylvania and New Mexico signers included qualifications tied to possible future legal rulings, while signers in five other states claimed to be duly elected electors despite lacking state certification. That distinction matters when examining the intentions and potential liability of individual participants.
The committee documented attempts to deliver paperwork to Washington and pressure Vice President Mike Pence to treat the uncertified slates as a reason to reject or delay votes. Pence did not do so.
The paperwork itself is the key to understanding this episode. Each certificate attempted to create a second documentary account of who had cast a state's electoral votes. The controversy was not about whether citizens could dispute an election result; it was about presenting documents that could be mistaken for official state action when the states had already certified a different slate.
The differences among states also matter. Conditional language in Pennsylvania and New Mexico made those certificates unlike the unqualified assertions in several other states. A careful account must examine each certificate's wording and the state certification records before assigning a common intent to every signer.
The effort ultimately depended on someone in Washington giving the alternate documents procedural significance. Pence's refusal meant that the purported slates did not replace the certified electoral votes in the congressional count. That distinction separates the existence of false paperwork from its failure to alter the transfer of power.
The scheme subsequently became the subject of investigations and litigation in multiple jurisdictions. A congressional committee’s conclusions, prosecutors’ allegations, and court findings are different kinds of evidence and should not be conflated.