With recovery efforts following widespread flooding ongoing in much of western North Carolina in the wake of Hurricane Helene, a Republican congressman suggested it “makes a lot of sense” to effectively cancel the state’s presidential election and declare Donald Trump the winner.

It does not, and the State Legislature does not actually have that power.

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

“It just seems like a power play,” Harris said, according to a recording POSTED to X by Ivan Raiklin, a Trump supporter who has advocated for state lawmakers to take power over awarding electoral votes. “In North Carolina, it’s legal. There are a lot of people who won’t be able to vote and it can make a difference in that state.”

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

No, no. And it looks like a power play because that’s exactly what it would be.

There are a number of reasons why someone might not vote on Election Day (or through early and absentee voting processes, both of which are underway in the parts of North Carolina devastated by Hurricane Helene). Some people choose not to vote. Others may just never get around to it. Rainy weather lowers voter turnout. Rarely, a major natural disaster could strike right before an election.

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

This is such a basic principle of (small-d) democratic (small-R) republican political systems that we find absurd that he even has to signal them.

Fortunately, Congress acted in the wake of the 2020 election to block some avenues that state legislatures could use to ignore legally tallied results. As Richard Pildes, professor of law at New York University, point out in a post on Electoral law blogTHE The law on the reform of the electoral number, past in 2022eliminated a long-standing federal provision that allowed state lawmakers to appoint lists of voters if they determined that a presidential election had “failed.”

“Furthermore, even if a natural disaster massively disrupts the electoral process in a state, federal law now requires that the solution be a popular vote which takes place once voting is possible again”, Pildes write. “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 those 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 saying the storm led to a “failed” election — or at least not without challenging that new federal law .

Even so, Harris’ comments suggest that some Republicans are heading into the 2024 election not just willing to count on undemocratic maneuvering by state lawmakers, but actively looking for opportunities for such shenanigans.

In August, when Vice President Kamala Harris called for tighter regulations on grocery store prices, Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell joke that “when your opponent calls you a ‘Communist,’ you may not propose price controls.”

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