N.Y. Times reports. Here’s the opening paragraph:

‘Prosecutors in Atlanta have informed 16 Trump supporters who formed an alternate slate of 2020 presidential electors from Georgia that they could face charges in an ongoing criminal investigation into election interference, underscoring the risk of criminal charges that Donald J. Trump and many of his allies may be facing in the state.‘

Deep into the article it’s reported that lawyers for some of the electors

‘asserted that “states (and their local governments) have no authority to interfere (through attempted criminalization or otherwise) with the process of sending potential elector slates to Congress for it to adjudicate.” They also pointed to the 1960 presidential election in Hawaii, where both the Nixon and Kennedy campaigns submitted electors, in asserting that there was precedent for more than one slate of electors.‘

The circumstances of the 1960 election in Hawaii were very different from the meeting of alternate electors in 2020 in Georgia or any other state. Still, I’m curious to hear more about the federalism, and potential preemption, arguments that might be made in connection with the application of state criminal laws to any group of individuals attempting to assert a claim that they are the lawful electors of a state. As I wrote recently for Just Security, such assertions also arose in the disputed Hayes-Tilden of 1876 (another circumstance very different from 2020, for reasons explained there).

I suppose one argument in favor of the authority of states to use their criminal law to prosecute unauthorized attempts to assert the status of presidential elector is the Article II authority of the state legislature to choose the “manner” by which the state’s electors are appointed. Thus, if the Georgia legislature wants to utilize the state’s criminal law to protect against unlawful attempts to interfere with the appointment of electors pursuant to the popular vote that the state legislature authorized as its manner of appointing electors, I’m not sure there is any basis in federal law to preempt the state’s use of criminal law for this purpose. But this is the kind of issue that I’d want to consider more, after reading arguments on both side, before reaching a firm conclusion as to my own views of the matter.