Rep. Andy Harris wants to give Trump electoral votes in North Carolina because of Hurricane Helene

With recovery efforts following widespread flooding in progress Across much of western North Carolina, in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, a Republican congressman has suggested it makes “a lot of sense” to effectively cancel the state’s presidential election and declare Donald Trump the winner.

That’s not the case, and the state legislature doesn’t actually have that power.

Politics reports that Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) said Thursday that North Carolina state lawmakers must be willing to override the will of voters to avoid disenfranchising voters in flood-affected areas because they may not had been able to cast their vote.

“It just seems like a power play,” Harris said, according to a recording posted against X by Ivan Raiklin, a Trump supporter who has advocated for state lawmakers to seize power over awarding electoral votes. “In North Carolina it’s legitimate. There are a lot of people who don’t vote and it can make a difference in that state.”

Elsewhere in the same video, Harris says the move would be legitimate because “you know what that vote probably would have been.”

Um, no, you don’t. And it looks like a power play, because that’s exactly what it would be.

There are a number of reasons why someone might not vote on Election Day (or through early and absentee voting processes, both of which are underway in the parts of North Carolina devastated by Hurricane Helene). Some people choose not to vote. Others may simply never get around to it. Rainy weather depresses attendance. In rare cases, a major natural disaster can occur just before the elections.

That doesn’t matter. If someone fails to cast a vote, they don’t give state lawmakers the power to decide how “that vote would likely have gone,” as Harris suggests here. You can’t count votes that don’t exist, period.

This is such a basic principle of (small-D) democratic (small-R) republican political systems that it seems absurd to even point that out.

Fortunately, Congress has taken action in the wake of the 2020 election to block a number of avenues that state lawmakers could use to override the legally tallied results. As Richard Pildes, law professor at New York University, indicates in a message on the Blog about voting rightsthe Electoral Reform Act, 2022 is overstruck down a longstanding federal provision that allowed state lawmakers to appoint slates of electors if they determined a presidential election had “failed.”

“Furthermore, even if a natural disaster greatly disrupts a state’s electoral process, federal law now provides that the remedy is a plebiscite This will happen as soon as voting is possible again,” said Pildes writes. “Federal law leaves it to state law to determine the appropriate authorities and procedures to use in these circumstances, which state laws on election emergencies (in those states that have such laws) determine.”

So no, the North Carolina state legislature can’t simply hand Trump the state’s 16 electoral votes by saying the storm resulted in a “failed” election — or at least not without challenging that new federal law.

Still, Harris’ comments suggest that some Republicans are heading into the 2024 elections not only willing to consider anti-democratic maneuvers by state lawmakers, but actively seeking opportunities for such pranks.

In August, when Vice President Kamala Harris called for stricter rules on grocery store prices, Washington After columnist Catherine Rampell joked that “if your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ you might not propose price controls.”

Something similar could now be said about Andy Harris and anyone else in the Republican Party considering this kind of effort. If your opponents accuse you of undermining democracy, don’t suggest that it makes “perfect sense” to ignore the will of the voters.