The leader of a prominent anti-LGBTQ+ group reportedly tried to convince Mike Pence to rig the 2020 election for Donald Trump.
National Organization for Marriage (NOM) Chairman John Eastman proposed having the former vice president count the votes in the election, according to a memo originally obtained by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. Woodward and Costa claim in the newly released book, Peril, that Eastman urged him to throw out ballots from seven swing states whose electors supposedly cast conflicting votes for Trump and Joe Biden, the latter of whom ultimately won the election.
These conflicting electors are known as “shadow electors,” who cast purely symbolic votes for Trump with no legal significance, according to the nonpartisan fact-checking organization Politifact. Biden won each of these states, which included Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, and Nevada.
Eastman, who served at the time as a member of Trump’s legal team, suggested that Pence intervene on his former boss’ behalf, even though the situation was fully legal.
“There is very solid legal authority, and historical precedent, for the view that the President of the Senate does the counting, including the resolution of disputed electoral votes, and all the Members of Congress can do is watch,” Eastman wrote a six-point plan entitled “January 6 scenario.”
Were the seven states’ votes to be thrown out, Eastman’s memo called for Pence to declare Trump as reelected with 232 electoral votes. Although he recognized that Democrats would assert that 270 electoral votes is required to win a presidential election, Eastman envisioned a scenario in which Pence would call upon the Republican-controlled House to decide the outcome of the race. Assuming that all 26 Republican delegates would vote for Trump, he would remain president.
“The main thing here is that Pence should do this without asking for permission — either from a vote of the joint session or from the Court,” Eastman wrote, adding: “The fact is that the Constitution assigns this power to the Vice President as the ultimate arbiter. We should take all of our actions with that in mind.”
“Let the other side challenge his actions in court,” he concluded.
One major issue with carrying out Eastman’s scheme, however, is that it reportedly misunderstands how election law operates. While the vice president does typically open the votes and announce the final tally of presidential elections, nothing in the Constitution or the Electoral Control Act of 1887 would have given Pence the authority to declare a state’s votes invalid, according to Politifact.
In other words, the vice president’s role in opening envelopes is merely symbolic. The second-in-command has no ability to determine the fate of elections.
The plan was first proposed to Pence on January 4 in one of Trump’s many attempts to convince Pence that he had the authority to overturn the election, according to CNN. The former Vice President did not go along with the strategy, leading Trump to attack Pence for not having “the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution,” which Trump tweeted as the Capitol was being stormed on January 6.
The failed scheme appears to have been Eastman’s last-ditch effort at assisting Trump in overturning the election results. He represented Trump in Texas v. Pennsylvania, a lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that sought to block certain swing states’ votes from being counted in the race.
Prior to his role in attempting to subvert democracy, Eastman is well-known to the LGBTQ+ community for a long record of opposing equality. His organization, NOM, has been classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as a “hate group” and was a leading proponent of California’s infamous Proposition 8, in which voters overturned marriage equality at the ballot box in 2008. The marriage rights of same-sex couples would later be restored by the Supreme Court.
Exactly 10 years later, NOM was active in Taiwan’s national referendum on same-sex marriage. Co-founder Brian Brown personally traveled to Taiwan in 2018 to plead with voters to reject the freedom to marry, which failed at the ballot by a 2-1 margin despite wide public support for LGBTQ+ rights.
The results of the nonbinding vote were vetoed by Taiwan’s parliament, which passed a same-sex marriage bill in May 2019. The historic action made Taiwan the largest municipality in Asia to ever recognize same-sex unions.
Eastman himself has a long history of homophobic remarks that extends beyond his organization’s activism. He has referred to homosexuality as an “indicator of barbarism” and once claimed that legalizing same-sex marriage would have “catastrophic consequences for civil society,” according to the watchdog organization Right Wing Watch. He also supported an anti-gay bill in Uganda criminalizing the “promotion” of homosexuality and jailing queer people for life.
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