How to steal a presidential election

Harvard law professor Lessig (The Future of Ideas) and Stanford legal scholar Seligman investigate in this labyrinthine study several pathways by which a "MAGA Republican" candidate might narrowly lose the electoral college vote, but triumph through legal chicanery. Included are several scenarios that hinge on the byzantine Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, which governs how Congress counts electoral college votes from states. In one such scheme, a rogue Republican governor alleges nonexistent election fraud to certify a bogus slate of electors, and a Republican House majority votes to accept it. Other scenarios include faithless Democratic electors coerced by right-wing threats; the passage of state laws declaring the state legislature the judge of election results; and state legislatures simply canceling a presidential election and choosing the state's electors themselves, a procedure that the authors worry could be interpreted as constitutional. Lessig and Seligman explain these strategies in intricate detail while keeping their arguments lucid and comprehensible for laypeople. They recommend legal tweaks to make subversion harder, but warn that no law can protect election integrity if politicians won't defend it. Though the authors' forecasts sometimes seem far-fetched, for the most part, this is a sobering look at how a coup might proceed through the courts. It's worth checking out for legal observers and those involved with electoral law. (Feb.)

Tired of the lies about the 2020 election? Buckle up: Trump is just warming up, and his allies may be getting craftier. "This is not a book about January 6, 2021. It is a book about January 6, 2025," write legal scholars Lessig and Seligman. We are lucky, Lessig suggests, that John Eastman and his fellow plotters "picked the dumbest possible strategy for pursuing what we feared they were trying to accomplish": namely, trying to convince Mike Pence that he had the constitutional authority to refuse to certify the results by which Joe Biden won the presidency. One might argue that the second dumbest strategy was to send an army of fascist goons to the Capitol to try to enforce Eastman's argument. However, Lessig and Seligman argue, there are holes in the Constitution wide enough to drive a burning dumpster through, and they might allow an interested party to falsely claim victory in a closely contested race and win the election. The authors presume that any such gaming-the-system effort will come from MAGA Republicans, though they add that a Democrat could easily use the same tactics. Readers may need a law degree to follow some of the arguments, but others are quite accessible. One argument that Lessig has been mounting for some time, for instance, is that the winner-take-all method employed by most states for electoral votes needs to be replaced with an apportionment system so that the Electoral College count will align with the popular vote. On that score, the authors warn, the prospect of rogue electors--or more, rogue governors who control those electors--is very real, and numerous other threats could enable someone smarter than the last bunch to mount "a cataclysmic attack on our democracy." Welcome reading for anyone concerned with real rigged elections. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.