After MSNBC’s Ari Melber aired video this week of right-wing political operative Roger Stone pushing for Republican legislatures to replace electors — similar in purpose to the fake electors scheme central to former President Donald Trump’s criminal indictments over his 2020 election theft attempt — Media Matters found multiple instances of Stone urging this version of election theft in right-wing media appearances and a social media post after the election.
As Melber emphasized in his August 16 scoop, Stone was shown dictating a memo on November 5, 2020, involving a plot to convince Republican-led state legislatures in multiple states Joe Biden won to replace legitimate electors with slates of false electors for Trump two days before major news organizations called the election for Biden. For his version of the fake electors scheme, Trump was charged on August 1 with conspiracy to defraud the United States, along with other criminal charges, and the fake electors plot was featured in his Georgia indictment as well.
Although Trump’s unindicted co-conspirators in that plot have been identified through the efforts of journalists, Stone’s name was not among them, and he had escaped attention over the indictments until now. In the 2020 election’s aftermath, Stone continued to push his scheme to replace Biden electors with illegitimate Trump electors in order to overturn the election in multiple appearances on far-right media programs and posts to his Telegram account. In echoes of the discredited and unconstitutional Independent State Legislature theory, Stone claimed that the nonexistent evidence of fraud, which failed to win any court victories for the Trump team, could be used to persuade GOP-majority state legislatures to swap their electors from Biden to Trump. Stone's scheme would have pursued a different means to the same end to steal the election for Trump through the Electoral College.