As reported by Rick Hasen at the Election Law Blog, Stephen Miller has now announced that alternative slates of electors are in fact voting in each of the swing states. Rick discounts the significance of this. I think he moves too quickly in reaching that happy conclusion.
The precedent is Hawaii, 1960. As Van Jones and I had written on CNN.com on November 4,
In 1960, Hawaii’s vote was incredibly close. On the first count, Nixon had beaten John F. Kennedy by 141 votes. On November 28, the acting governor certified a Republican slate of electors. They met on December 19 and cast their ballots for Nixon.
But a recount showed that, in fact, Kennedy had won the popular vote by an even closer margin of 115 votes. That recount had been completed on December 30, 11 days after the Republican electors from Hawaii had cast their votes for Nixon. Five days later, the governor sent Congress a new certification of electors, this time naming the Democratic electors as the electors properly chosen by Hawaii’s voters. That certification arrived in Congress on January 6, the day that Congress was to count the electoral votes. When then-Vice President Nixon, who the Constitution had set as the custodian of the electoral votes, began to…
