Roxan Wetzel is a relative newcomer to politics. She began to get involved in 2019, she said, inspired by the start of North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson’s meteoric rise in politics.
“Our government was founded on the principle that it would be ordinary citizens that go to serve in government,” Wetzel told TPM. “Mark is that guy.”
Wetzel’s journey as an activist since then has taken her far. She had a stint as chairwoman of her county GOP, and recently ran, successfully, to become a presidential elector for Donald Trump in 2024.
Once treated as a mere formality, Trump’s attempt to stay in power after losing the 2020 election turned electors like Wetzel into a potential hinge point for the outcome of the election. In November and December 2020, Trump pressured election officials and state legislatures not to affirm Biden’s victory. When that failed, his attorneys recruited slates of “alternate” electors to send to Congress. Among them were some of the same people who would have been 2020 electors for their state had Trump won.
The fake electors were the keystone of Trump’s plot to stay in power, and proved to be especially low-hanging fruit for prosecutors: those involved allegedly created and submitted a fake document to the federal government. Those who participated in alternate electors schemes faced prosecution in four states. Congress addressed the ambiguities that Trump exploited in 2020 with a 2022 law called the Electoral Count Reform Act, specifying that the governor of a state certifies the electors and tightening procedures for how a state’s votes are debated.
But despite the criminal investigations and legal changes, the 2024 Trump campaign has speculated about contesting the election past Election Day, well into January 2025. Trump has repeatedly refused to commit to accepting the results of the election, and has been spreading 2020-esque claims of widespread fraud. In several states — including the swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Nevada — Republicans who acted as fake electors in 2020 are again signed up to serve as electors in 2024. Many others swing state electors are publicly outspoken 2020 election deniers.
It all raises an obvious question: If asked by the Trump campaign, would any 2024 Trump electors convene in the event of a Harris victory as part of another, perhaps even more farcical, effort to attain power after losing?
TPM contacted 61 of the 83 people who, per secretary of state offices, are set to serve as 2024 electors for Trump in six swing states — Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Arizona. (The state GOP in a seventh swing state, Wisconsin, has said that their electors will abide by whichever candidate is certified as the winner; the state’s 2020 fake electors are subject to a civil settlement that bars them from participating again.) Each candidate fields a slate of electors equal in number to that state’s Electoral College votes. The vast majority of the electors TPM contacted declined to speak or did not reply to requests for comment.
Of the seven Trump electors who were willing to speak with TPM, all said they had entertained doubts, to varying degrees, about the legitimacy of the 2020 election, and described their own efforts to “fix” what they regarded as the errors of that year. In several cases, electors refused to rule out repeating what many GOP electors in swing states did in 2020 at the direction of the Trump campaign: convene after the state was lost in an effort to provide Trump with the means to continue to challenge his defeat.
Trump electors in some states restated to TPM arguments that Trump campaign attorneys made in 2020. If Harris is declared the winner of the state, they said, and the Trump campaign points to evidence of significant fraud in the election, then they would need to participate in order to ensure that Trump retained a chance at victory.
After TPM asked if she would convene in North Carolina after a dispute in the state similar to those that Trump orchestrated in 2020, Wetzel replied: “If there’s some sort of dispute like that, I’m definitely going to show up.”
‘We’ll Just Have to See’
After his defeat in 2020, Trump spent the transition to a Biden administration sowing the myth that a cast of shadowy actors stole the election from him. There’s various iterations of his theories, including a more absurd version, put forth memorably by Sidney Powell, that involves Hugo Chavez, international communist conspiracies, and voting machine companies. A somewhat more tenable talking point advanced by other Trump lawyers insists that Trump lost because of changes to states’ election procedures for COVID, which, these lawyers contend, were made illegally. Dozens of judges rejected these arguments.
Conservative activists kept the belief in a stolen election alive. In 2021, they began to build a movement around supposed election integrity. The aim was to ensure that what happened in 2020 could, in Trump’s words, “never happen again,” while calling upon its adherents to engage in a simulacrum of old-fashioned civic activism: they should get involved in elections operations at the local level.
One person who heard the call is Salleigh Grubbs, a Georgia 2024 presidential elector for Trump who garnered attention for her journey from self-described “keyboard warrior” in 2020 to local party official. Grubbs was elected chair of the Cobb County, Georgia GOP in 2021; Trump reportedly called her after she won.
Grubbs ignited a controversy in August by proposing a rule to Georgia’s state election board that would allow county officials to delay election certification by giving them broad powers to examine vote totals and mandating that county boards conduct “reconciliation” of vote totals by ballots cast against voter ID numbers.
Grubbs declined to say whether she would work with a potential Trump campaign effort to convene electors in the event of a defeat.
“I hope to god not because then I’ll not want to be an elector if that’s what happened,” Grubbs told TPM.
She went on to provide the reasoning for the fake electors put forth by Trump campaign attorneys: He was, in 2020, simply trying to “protect” his “position” in the event that “there were enough ballots” to show that he had, in fact, won the election. Grubbs called the charges against the Georgia fake electors a “travesty.”
“People were not trying to overthrow the election,” she said.
TPM spoke to one Trump elector from Nevada, Bruce Wayne Parks (the other five Trump electors did not respond to TPM’s request for comment). When asked if he would serve as an “alternate” or “fake” elector in the event of a Harris certification, Parks replied, “Well, we’ll just have to see, won’t we?”
In Pennsylvania, five of the 2020 Trump fake electors are back on the list of 19 electors to serve in 2024. The state’s 2020 experience was unique; after most of the original slate declined to participate in the Trump campaign’s scheme, Trump lawyers recruited other Trump supporters to serve as their “alternate” electors. Those who did go along with it secured language in their certificates saying that they would only be legitimate if Trump persuaded a court to overturn his loss in the state.
Ash Khare, a 2020 fake elector on Pennsylvania’s 2024 GOP slate, declined to rule out participating in another alternate elector plan. Later in the conversation, Khare told TPM that, after reflection, he had come to consider Biden’s 2020 win “legitimate.”
Other Trump electors in Pennsylvania emphasized to TPM that they remain persuaded that Trump won in 2020, and that they were open to convening as electors in the event that the state certifies Harris as the winner.
“I think in America you have the right to challenge something if you think there’s improprieties, no matter what side,” Jim Worthington, a Trump elector who served as Pennsylvania’s lead delegate to the 2024 Republican national convention, told TPM.
JD Longo, a Trump elector and the mayor of Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, told TPM: “I just think it’s ridiculous to think that Americans shouldn’t have a right to ask questions or to challenge the results of an election if they feel that there were improprieties or instances of fraud.”
Pennsylvania Trump elector Bill Bachenberg is returning to the 2024 slate after leading the state’s fake electors in 2020. Bachenberg worked with Trump aligned lawyers in 2020 and 2021 to breach voting machines as part of an effort to substantiate claims of fraud, according to multiple reports and a lawsuit from a cybersecurity firm that was hired to evaluate the machines. Bachenberg has denied the firm’s allegation, and did not respond to TPM’s request to discuss his role as an elector in 2024.
In Georgia, TPM was able to speak with one Trump elector out of 16; she also refused to rule out participating as a fake elector. Two other electors in that state initially agreed to speak with TPM before canceling interviews, saying that they were advised against it.
‘Treasonous’
In some states, the consequences of 2020 appear to have blocked the local GOP from entertaining a second fake elector scheme — at least for now. Wisconsin’s fake electors agreed to a settlement last year in which they admitted that Trump had lost the election, and to not serve as electors in the 2024 election. The state party has said that it would only convene a slate of electors if Trump is certified to have won the state.
TPM was unable to have substantive conversations with any Michigan or Arizona Trump electors, despite attempting to contact all 11 in Arizona and five of 15 in Michigan. Prosecutors in both states have criminally charged all of the 2020 fake electors there, but there’s a key difference: While Arizona’s 2024 slate contains no fake electors from 2020, six of Michigan’s Trump 2024 electors participated in the 2020 fake elector scheme. Other 2024 Michigan electors have stated publicly that the 2020 election was fraudulent. Jim Tokarski, a 2024 Michigan Trump elector who did not participate in 2020, told the Detroit News last year that Trump “deserves to have his next term in office.”
The 2020 fake electors plot paved the way for the shambolic violence of Jan. 6. It allowed the Trump campaign to hold on to many of its supporters, encouraging the belief that he could still be declared the winner if only Mike Pence or some other actor were to give Congress a chance at certifying the fake Trump slates as the real ones. For the coup attempt, the fake electors acted in 2020 as a bridge; after they convened in mid-December, any outcome that Trump pursued required the fake electors’ participation in some form.
In some cases, the end result of that effort in 2020 links directly to 2024. In the most dramatic example among the Trump electors TPM spoke with, Wetzel, the North Carolina elector, posted on Facebook the day after Jan. 6 that “I WAS THERE!!!” and that “We sang gospel songs as we marched to the Capitol, not war songs.”
When TPM asked if she had been at the Capitol on Jan. 6, Wetzel replied: “I think I might take the 5th Amendment on that one.”
In North Carolina, TPM contacted 10 of the 16 Trump electors and spoke with two of them: Wetzel, who said that she would “show up” to a convention of the electors if Harris won the state, and another elector who said emphatically that he would not.
That elector, Michael Magnanti, told TPM he had spent much of his life involved in various aspects of Republican Party politics. He came up as a young Republican, and recalled protesting during the 2000 Florida recount outside the Palm Beach County courthouse.
Magnanti said that he believed certain procedures in the 2020 election were illegitimate because election rules had been changed due to COVID “in the middle of the game.”
But he emphatically denied that he would participate in any elector meeting if Trump loses his state.
“You can’t just say, well, we’re going to meet anyway or try to convince electors not to vote for the rightful person,” Magnanti said. “That’s, like, treasonous. Really, it is. It’s treasonous. The whole thing is, that’s where the peaceful transfer of power begins.”
Behold, The Enemy Within!
Are they also primed to be prosecuted in a multistate RICO indictment for electoral fraud again by another Fani Willis?
I believe the appropriate maga-approved response would be fuck your feelings.
Fanaticism garbed as faux patriotism — a MAGA specialty.
Not to put too fine a point on it, especially given Mr. Kovensky’s highly-professional work as a TPM journalist, but could we please stop using GOP language?
For decades, experimental studies have shown – convincingly – that every time a lie gets repeated, even to debunk it, it reinforces the lie. (That might seem counter-intuitive, but it’s been proven again and again.)
We know that those who control the language control the debate, and the last thing we need to do is cede that language and that debate to inveterate liars backing a criminal who’s (literally) told us he wants to “terminate the Constitution”.