Asking how this was supposed to work misses the point. Congress was never going to accept the fake electors, either by mistake or by design. Instead, this seems to have been part of the Trump camp’s strategy of trying everything, seeing what stuck, and sowing enough confusion and havoc that the January 6 certification wouldn’t happen. After that, perhaps the House would have to elect the president, and because more delegations were controlled by Republicans, Trump could be installed for a second term. Or something like that; trying to understand the chaotic effort too concertedly is probably a mistake…

The renewed attention to the phony electors also helps fill in the picture of how large the election-theft push was. On the surface, the whole maneuver looks like the province of a few wild-eyed figures: Trump, Eastman, Giuliani, the attorneys Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell, Jeffrey Clark, and Mike Lindell. As more information emerges, though, the size of the front grows.

A total of 83 phony electors were submitted—and most electors are deeply involved in party politics at the local or state level, meaning these were not simply random Republican voters but seasoned political activists and operators. (Of the 83, 25 were in the two states—Pennsylvania and New Mexico—that submitted the phony slates provisionally.) The list of other participants in the broader effort has continued to grow too. White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’s role was larger than initially understood. The public has met a series of other players: Philip Waldron, an Army veteran turned cybersecurity investigator; the businessman Russell Ramsland; the Overstock.com founder Patrick Byrne; the professional bad penny Bernard Kerik; and members of Congress such as Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania.