EDITORIAL: 'Fake electors' were fake news; where do they go to get their reputations back?

In a presidential election year that’s sure to include civil and criminal court cases, administrative dictates and other dirty tricks to thwart President Donald Trump from participating in another election, we can finally scratch the so-called “fake elector scheme” from the skullduggery, at least here in New Mexico.

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez announced Friday that after a more than year-long investigation there will be no criminal charges filed against the five Republican alternate electors in the 2020 presidential race. Why? Because they had broken no laws. Unfortunately, it took three years to reach the obvious conclusion.

Six qualified political parties in New Mexico, including the Democratic and Republican parties, nominated five electors each prior to the 2020 general election to serve as presidential electors should their party’s pair of presidential and vice presidential candidates prevail in the popular vote. It’s the usual practice of political parties, election cycle after election cycle, prior to a joint session of Congress certifying the electoral count.

And given the court challenges at the time, the Republican electors met in Santa Fe on Dec. 14, 2020, and signed a certificate pledging their votes for Donald Trump and Mike Pence, “on the understanding that it might later be determined that we are the duly elected and qualified Electors for President and Vice President of the United States of America from the State of New Mexico.”

The signed certificate was sent to the president of the U.S. Senate and the National Archives.

Democrats and the media have tried to make hay of it for three years. But in fact, it’s a big case of a nothing burger, yet another one.

Investigators from the AG’s Office interviewed the five Republican electors, reviewed thousands of pages of documents and concluded the GOP electors had broken no laws, although Torrez threw his political base a bone or two, calling the alternate electors “fake” and saying new state laws were needed to prevent future misunderstandings.

“Based on this conditional language and the fake electors’ belief that the certificate would have no effect in the absence of a successful lawsuit challenging New Mexico’s election results, there is not enough evidence to establish that they had an intent to defraud in support of a charge of forgery,” states a 29-page final report from the AG’s Office. “Nor is there a crime in the Election Code that would apply to the actions of the fake electors and the Trump campaign.”

Although the Democratic AG’s report didn’t exactly exonerate the Republican electors, it did say: “To a person, the New Mexico contingent believed that the alternate certificate of votes would have no legal effect without a successful legal challenge to the election results in New Mexico, and the NMAGO’s interviews and review of documents and communications revealed no evidence to the contrary.”

The bottom line: Torrez said “prosecutors determined that New Mexico’s fake electors are not subject to prosecution under current law.”

Steve Pearce, chairman of the Republican Party of New Mexico, rightfully called out the hypocrisy. Political parties have previously submitted alternate electors to Congress in disputed elections. Pearce pointed out a similar case in Hawaii in the razor-thin 1960 presidential election.

“AG Torrez is hypocritically trying to criminalize a process that famously allowed Democrats in Hawaii to cast their vote for John F. Kennedy despite the state being called for Richard Nixon during the 1960 Presidential election,” Pearce said Friday. “Had the Democratic electors not cast their votes for John F. Kennedy by the federal deadline, even though the state was still called for Nixon, they would have lost their ability to have their electoral vote counted when the election outcome eventually did change in that instance.”

Pearce said numerous election issues in 2020 faced the possibility of being challenged in court, so the state’s Republican electors cast their votes by the federal deadline — the first Tuesday after the second Wednesday in December — “in the event the election outcome changed.”

As much as some may discount them, President Trump’s legal team challenged many aspects of the 2020 general election, whose outcome wasn’t certain until Jan. 7, 2021, when Congress certified the election results.

So, after a year-long investigation of unknown costs, the “fake elector” story in New Mexico was much ado about nothing.

“New Mexicans are tired of Democrats’ unproductive stunts that are a diversion from the real issues affecting our state and the actual assaults being waged on New Mexicans’ constitutional rights by the Democrat Party,” Pearce concluded in his statement on Friday.

The presidential polling, at least nationally, would appear to bear that out. Trump is leading in all the major polls in battleground states, even while his opponents pull out all the stops and demonstrate little restraint.

That leaves the one burning question — where do the smeared GOP “fake electors” go to get their reputations back?