If Trump Prepares for Tyranny, Will Republicans Follow?

Let’s be clear: Any attempt by Republican state legislators to appoint their own set of electors — the people who will actually select the next president in the electoral college — in defiance of their states’ voters after the Nov. 3 election would be a flat-out attack on constitutional government. If it succeeded in keeping a defeated president in office, it would replace the rule of law with partisan power. It would, as political scientist William Adler put it, be “the end of the republic.”

This outlandish scenario now has to be taken seriously because President Donald Trump’s campaign and at least some swing-state Republicans are thinking about trying it, according to reporting from Barton Gellman in The Atlantic. The idea would be to claim without cause — serious claims with evidence to back them could be adjudicated in the courts, after all — that an actual vote count that extends past Election Day as mail-in ballots are reviewed is so fraudulent that the legislature has no choice but to step in: