Dem
51
GOP
49
If Donald Trump loses in 2024, will we get endless court cases and an armed mob attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2025? Trump may try, but some key things are different. For one, Trump will not have the power of the presidency and the DoJ on his side. He will not be able to claim victory on election night from the East Room of the White House. Doing that from Mar-a-Lago or some Trump-branded hotel doesn't have quite the same ring of authenticity.
Also, the person overseeing the counting of the electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2025 will be President of the Senate Kamala Harris, not Mike Pence. She is not going to ask the states to try again. The Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 (ECRA) states that the VPOTUS is merely a clerk who watches the count and keeps score, not a judge who has any authority to interfere with it or reject electoral votes. If a mob outside the Capitol doesn't like that, Biden will be the one to decide whether to call out the National Guard and when. He will also be the one to decide if he should invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy the military.
If there is some institutional deadlock on or after Jan. 6, Biden will remain in control of the levers of power until Jan. 20, 2025, at noon. Staying in power is easier than trying to acquire it, since the Secret Service, law enforcement, and the military will listen to the sitting president before they listen to a challenger.
Trying to send in fake electoral votes won't work in 2025 because the ECRA states that the certificates of ascertainment, which contain the electoral votes, must be signed by the governor, unless state law dictates that some other person sign it. The only conceivable other person is the secretary of state. Could a Republican governor or SoS do this? Theoretically, yes, but only in states with a Republican governor or SoS. Here is the list of these officials in the major swing states.
| State | Governor | Secretary of State |
| Arizona | Katie Hobbs (D) | Adrian Fontes (D) |
| Georgia | Brian Kemp (R) | Brad Raffensperger (R) |
| Michigan | Gretchen Whitmer (D) | Jocelyn Benson (D) |
| Minnesota | Tim Walz (D) | Steve Simon (D) |
| Nevada | Joe Lombardo (R) | Francisco Aguilar (D) |
| New Hampshire | Chris Sununu (R) | David Scanlan (R) |
| North Carolina | Roy Cooper (D) | Elaine Marshall (D) |
| Pennsylvania | Josh Shapiro (D) | Al Schmidt (R) |
| Wisconsin | Tony Evers (D) | Sarah Godlewski (D) |
In only three of these swing states is the governor a Republican, and in one of those three, namely Georgia, the governor is not only a straight shooter, but a Trump hater. In New Hampshire, the governor is making nice with Trump right now, but is not likely to commit crimes on The Donald's behalf. In Nevada, Gov. Joe Lombardo (R-NV) has endorsed Trump, but the secretary of state, Francisco Aguilar, is a Democrat. If Lombardo signs a fake certificate of ascertainment, Aguilar, the guy who counts the votes, will instantly sue him and argue in court that he counted the votes and Trump lost. That should be a fairly potent argument. In other words, it doesn't appear that in any of the swing states, a fake-electors scheme would be easy to pull off because either the governor wouldn't sign it or the guy who counted the votes would contest it in court. (V)