Attorney Alan Dershowitz said during Wednesday’s episode of “The Dershow” that Al Gore’s legal team had “alternate electors” ready during his challenge of the 2000 presidential election results in Florida.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and special counsel Jack Smith secured indictments of Trump over his efforts to challenge the results of the 2020 election and his legal team’s use of slates of “alternate electors.” Dershowitz said the historical use of alternate electors, including in the 1960 presidential election, made it hard to explain how that was a crime.
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“I have a hard time explaining January 6 in Washington, D.C. or January 6 in Fulton County Georgia, because what they did basically was to create a slate of alternate electors in the event that a recount led to the court saying: No, no, no, no, no it wasn’t the Democrats who won. It was the Republicans who won, so the Republicans be ready with a slate of alternate electors so that on December 6, January 6, rather, 2021, they could have presented that slate of electors to the vice president and that would have been the official slate of electors,” Dershowitz said. “If there were no alternate slate of electors and the court on January 5 came up with a ruling saying ‘Oh, wow, we’ve looked at this, and, and these votes were improperly counted, or this was unconstitutional.’ Take, for example, Pennsylvania.”
“We know that in Pennsylvania, the governor allowed people to vote and count votes after the polls closed,” Dershowitz said. “Now the legislature said ‘No.’ The governor overruled the legislature, but the Constitution is very clear that the decision as to how to run presidential elections in every state is up to the state [legislature]. So the Supreme Court clearly would have found those votes that were cast after the close of the polls to be unconstitutionally counted. Now, those alone wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the election. The election people say there were things that would have, but let’s assume that it would have changed the outcome of Pennsylvania.”
Dershowitz reviewed disputed elections in American history, saying that in three cases, slates of alternate electors were involved in the 1876 and 1960 elections. He then said that the Gore-Lieberman campaign had a plan similar to the one the Trump campaign had in 2020 if they had prevailed in their legal efforts during the Florida recount.
“You need alternate electors. That happened in the Tilden-Hayes election. That happened in the President Kennedy election with Hawaii, where they had enrolled an alternate slate of electors,” Dershowitz said. “When I was litigating in Bush vs. Gore, that was our plan. That was the idea that constitutional law professors came up with: Have alternate electors ‘because, you know, we didn’t know until the Supreme Court decided to stop the count in Bush vs. Gore, we didn’t know who won Florida.”
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