Jan. 1, 2021

New Year's Day is traditionally spent recovering from the previous night's revelry. This year, the United States awakens to the greatest New Year's hangover in the country's almost 245-year history: a crisis of constitutional legitimacy as all three branches of government continue to battle over who will take the presidential oath of office later this month. This coming Wednesday, Jan. 6, a joint session of Congress will meet for what is a traditionally perfunctory counting of the Electoral College votes. With lawsuits still pending in seven states, both major-party candidates claiming victory via massive advertising campaigns and the president hinting that he might not accept the outcome of the vote, it's time to reflect on how everything went so very wrong...

...It wasn’t until a selection of voting machines started displaying a ransom note in red on black text that the enormity of what had occurred was clear. As was reported in the following weeks, around a quarter of the DRE systems in the three states had been loaded with a backdoored version of the last code update provided by the device manufacturer. This malware had different impacts based on several factors, and subsequent analysis by the Department of Homeland Security showed that votes may have been subtly changed or deleted—or the entire device encrypted and its contents lost. Without voter-verified paper trails, the votes cast by these systems have been challenged in court....

...It is small comfort that there is now one topic on which most Americans can agree: The latest polling shows that fully 78 percent of Americans believe that the election has been stolen. The hitch, of course, is that Americans do not agree which candidate is the rightful president and which the usurper.

That brings us to the present day. Two groups of electors purporting to represent the voters of Pennsylvania, one appointed by the legislature and the other by the governor, met in December and transmitted competing "official" results to the archivist of the United States. Lawsuits have prevented the electoral results of three other states, including Florida, from being submitted, and multiple cases with no clear precedent or outcome are still pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. At this point, it seems a distinct possibility that the House and the Senate will end up selecting the president and vice president, likely with no regard to the votes cast in each statea complicated process made even more so by the fact that doubts over the presidential vote have also raised questions about the legitimate composition of Congress.