With recovery efforts following widespread flooding in progress In much of western North Carolina, in the wake of Hurricane Helene, a Republican congressman suggested it “made perfect sense” to cancel the presidential election in State and declare Donald Trump the winner.

This is not the case, and the state legislature does not actually have this power.

Policy reports Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) said Thursday that North Carolina state lawmakers should be willing to override the will of voters to avoid disenfranchising voters in flood-affected areas. vote who might not have been able to vote.

“It looks like a simple power play,” Harris said, according to a recording job to X by Ivan Raiklin, a Trump supporter who has advocated for state lawmakers to take power over the allocation of electoral votes. “In North Carolina, it’s legitimate. There are a lot of people who won’t be able to vote and that could make a difference in this state.”

Elsewhere in the same video, Harris says the move would be legitimate because “you know what that vote probably would have been.”

Um, no, that’s not the case. And it feels like a power play because that’s exactly what it would be.

There are many reasons why someone might not vote on Election Day (or through early and mail-in voting processes, both underway in areas of North Carolina destroyed by Hurricane Helene). Some people choose not to vote. Others might just never get there. Rainy weather lowers participation. It is rare for a major natural disaster to strike just before an election.

It doesn’t matter. When someone fails to vote, it doesn’t give state lawmakers the power to decide how “that vote likely would have gone,” as Harris suggests here. You can’t count votes that don’t exist, period.

It’s such a fundamental principle of (little-d) democratic (small-r) of republican political systems that it seems absurd to have to point it out.

Fortunately, Congress acted in the wake of the 2020 election to block certain avenues that state legislatures could use to ignore legally counted results. Like Richard Pildes, a law professor at New York University, underlines this in a post on the Electoral law blogTHE Electoral Count Reform Act, adopted in 2022removed a longstanding federal provision that allowed state lawmakers to appoint slates of electors if they determined a presidential election had “failed.”

“Furthermore, even if a natural disaster massively disrupts the electoral process in a state, federal law now provides that the solution must be a popular vote this will take place once voting is possible again”, Pildes writing. “Federal law leaves it up to state law to determine the appropriate authorities and procedures to use in these circumstances, which state election emergency laws (in states that have such laws) determine.”

So no, the North Carolina State Legislature can’t just hand Trump the state’s 16 electoral votes by claiming the storm resulted in a “failed” election — or at least not without challenge this new federal law.

Still, Harris’ comments suggest that some Republicans are heading into the 2024 elections not only willing to contemplate undemocratic maneuvers by state lawmakers, but actively seeking opportunities for such shenanigans.

In August, when Vice President Kamala Harris called for tighter regulation of grocery store prices, Washington Job columnist Catherine Rampell joked that “when your opponent calls you a “communist,” maybe don’t propose price controls.”

A similar thing could now be said about Andy Harris and anyone else in the Republican Party considering this type of effort. When your opponents accuse you of trying to subvert democracy, maybe don’t suggest that it “makes perfect sense” to ignore the will of voters.