What to know about the Pennsylvania fake electors mentioned in Trump’s third indictment

Efforts by former President Donald Trump and his allies to organize fake slates of presidential electors from seven states ahead of Congress’ certification of the 2020 vote play a central role in the four-count indictment charging him with conspiracy to defraud the United States.

Here’s what to know about Pennsylvania’s fake electors and how they factor into the latest Trump indictment:

According to the 45-page indictment, after Trump and his allies failed to persuade officials in the battleground states to illegally swing the election in his favor, they began recruiting groups of “fake electors” — also sometimes called “false electors” or “alternate electors” — whom they hoped could be used to disrupt the congressional certification of the 2020 vote and overturn the result of the election.

When a presidential candidate wins a state, a set of “electors” for that candidate represents the state in the Electoral College. These representatives formally cast the state’s electoral votes.

In the 2020 election, both President Joe Biden’s and Trump’s campaigns lined up slates of electors in Pennsylvania — comprised mostly of prominent members of their respective party establishments — to represent them should they carry the state.

Normally, the electors for the victor participate in the Electoral College process, and the loser’s electors simply do nothing.

Not this time.

The Trump campaign’s efforts to put forth “fake electors” started as an attempt to preserve Trump’s rights during the Wisconsin recount, before escalating into what the indictment describes as “a corrupt plan to subvert the federal government function by stopping Biden electors’ votes from being counted and certified.”

The plan became an organized effort across all seven states in early December. And within days, the campaign began identifying lawyers in Pennsylvania and the other states who could help on the ground.

In the targeted states, the false electors met on Dec. 14 — the same day the legitimate Electoral College met across the country — and held their own version of the process to sign certificates of their votes. They then sent their votes to Mike Pence, who as vice president was also the president of the U.S. Senate; the National Archives; and others.

“Under the [Trump] plan, the submission of these fraudulent slates would create a fake controversy at the certification proceeding and position the Vice President — presiding on Jan. 6 as President of the Senate — to supplant legitimate electors with the Defendant’s fake electors and certify [Trump] as president,” the indictment reads.

False electors were also organized in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, and Wisconsin.

The following Pennsylvania Republicans met and signed a false electors list on Dec. 14, 2020:

Several Pennsylvania Republicans who had originally signed on to be Trump electors had he carried the state backed out of the plan as discussions turned toward submitting themselves as false electors. They include:

Last month, Michigan’s attorney general filed felony charges — including forgery and conspiracy to commit election forgery — against the 16 fake Trump electors in that state. But it’s unlikely their counterparts in Pennsylvania will face similar charges.

That’s because of a key clause the Pennsylvania electors included in the certificate they sent to Congress. Unlike the Trump electors in most of the other states, Pennsylvania’s said they were only putting themselves forward as the state’s legitimate electors if courts sided with the former president in the numerous election challenges he was pursuing at the time. He lost all of those lawsuits.

Gov. Josh Shapiro, who was serving as attorney general during the 2020 presidential election, has said that caveat likely protected the Pennsylvania Trump electors from legal liability.

“Though their rhetoric and policy were intentionally misleading and purposefully damaging to our democracy, based on our initial review, our office does not believe this meets the legal standards for forgery,” his office said in a statement last year.

The Pennsylvania clause was added because some would-be Trump electors “expressed concern about signing certificates representing themselves as legitimate electors” when it was not clear that Trump had won the state.

Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer who was involved in the effort, “falsely assured” the would-be electors that the electoral vote certificates would only be used if Trump succeeded in court, according to the indictment.

DeMarco, one of the electors and a prominent Allegheny County Republican, told The Inquirer earlier this year that he and his counterparts demanded the language be explicitly added to the paperwork.

“Folks like myself, and I’m not the only one, said, ‘You need to make the papers say that,’” DeMarco said.

The Inquirer reached out Wednesday to more than a dozen of the false electors and Trump electors who declined to become false electors. Two of the false electors — Poprik, the Bucks County GOP chair, and Gerow, a GOP strategist — shared the same sentiment: The slate of electors only wanted to sign as a precaution, as court cases continued to work through the system.

“A lot of us were not going [to sign] unless that was there,” Poprik said about the clause added in Pennsylvania. “I felt it was a protection.”

The campaign worried that other states would find out about that language, according to the indictment, and that including such caveats in certificates from other states could weaken Trump’s position ahead of the certification of the vote.

“The other States are signing what he prepared — if it gets out we changed the language for PA it could snowball,” said one campaign official in an internal communication quoted in the indictment.

Investigators working with Special Counsel Jack Smith subpoenaed DeMarco at his home last year.

“When we did not win in court, the matter ended,” DeMarco said in a statement at the time.

Other would-be electors, like Gerow, said they were not interviewed by investigators or the grand jury investigating Trump.

“The Pennsylvania group did everything properly,” he said.