State Legislatures Should Stay Out of the Presidential Contest Reason.com

Americans did not like the idea of state legislatures pushing aside voters in the early republic, and they would not like it today. Few things would be more destabilizing to the American political system than for legislatures to try to change the rules of the electoral game after the fact and announce that legally cast ballots will no longer be counted. The Constitution arguably gives state legislatures the power to appoint presidential electors right up until the day the electors meet to cast their ballots, even if legislatures had previously put some other system in place for selecting electors. But few constitutional norms are as strongly established as the one that holds that state legislatures should not take such an extraordinary step except under the most extreme of circumstances, as in situations like that of the newly-admitted Colorado.

For a legislature to attempt to settle an ongoing election dispute by imposing its own partisan solution would not only undermine the legitimacy of the particular presidential candidate the legislature was trying to help but it would be subversive of American faith in democratic elections generally. The political backlash could be expected to be severe.

Partisans can be expected to fight hard for their favored candidates, but at the end of the day the stability of a democracy depends on the willingness of all sides to live by the results of the election. We might not always be happy with the results of the election, or even with the process by which the election was run, but we live with such disappointments and imperfections and come back to campaign another day. State officials should make clear that their legislatures will not be partisan tools for weakening democracy.

via reason.com

Weeelll ok I guess.