The so-called “fake electors” narrative has finally collapsed under the weight of its own fabrication. One by one, the cases built by Democratic attorneys general against Republican alternate electors from the 2020 election have crumbled. The most recent example came in Nevada, where Clark County District Judge Mary Kay Holthus dismissed forgery and false-document charges against the six Republican electors, including state GOP Chair Michael McDonald. The judge found no evidence they intended to deceive officials. They had openly announced their purpose, and the certificates they signed could not be legally accepted under Nevada or federal law. Prosecutors’ claims of secret fraud evaporated the moment a court examined them.
The pattern is now unmistakable. In Michigan, a judge appointed by Governor Gretchen Whitmer dismissed all charges against 15 alternate electors in September 2025, ruling that prosecutors failed to prove specific intent to defraud. The electors were exercising their constitutional right to seek redress—posing for a photograph and testifying under oath that they genuinely believed the election was stolen—actions inconsistent with perpetrating a criminal conspiracy. In Arizona, Attorney General Kris Mayes’s sprawling indictment against 18 defendants, including Mark Meadows, Rudy Giuliani, Christina Bobb, and John Eastman, has been repeatedly rebuked. A trial judge found that prosecutors misled the grand jury by withholding the Electoral Count Act; an appeals court refused to revive the case; and the Arizona Supreme Court shut the door. AG Mayes now scrambles for a new grand jury, a desperate admission that the original case was improper. Similarly, the case against alternative electors in Georgia was dismissed last year as well in a blow to the disgraced low IQ Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.
These cases were never about enforcing the rule of law. They were poorly constructed political theatre, assembled years after the fact by Democratic AGs who coordinated their efforts with far-left nonprofits. Norm Eisen’s States United Democracy Center supplied the blueprints, Marc Elias’s lawfare operation provided legal cover, and the Democratic Attorneys General Association funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to boost the prosecution strategy as it was being crafted. What looked like independent state actions was actually a national scheme designed to criminalize political opposition. Yet the most damning part of the story is not the collapse of the cases. It is how ordinary the alternate-elector strategy was portrayed before Democrats decided to retcon it as a crime.
In the fall of 2020, major news outlets treated the possibility of “dueling electors” as a serious contingency, not a conspiracy. Reuters published an explainer on how competing slates in battleground states with split partisan control of governors and legislatures could deadlock the Electoral College, citing the historical precedent of 1876. An election guide posted by Politico casually walked through Republican operatives discussing alternate electors if Trump lost and claimed fraud, and Democratic governors responding with their own slates. No one called it sedition. It was framed as a constitutional stress test.
Even more striking was the war game played by the so-called Transition Integrity Project. Former White House Chief of Staff and pizza party aficionado John Podesta, playing the role of Joe Biden, refused to concede a narrow electoral defeat. He alleged voter suppression and persuaded the governors of Wisconsin and Michigan to send pro-Biden electors to the Electoral College. The New York Times reported the exercise without even an inkling of moral panic. It was treated as a genuine possibility that could come from either side of the political aisle in the case of a close or disputed election, not as some nefarious plot to overthrow the government.
Hellbound and Down 