Tag Archives: FaithlessElector

2024 Election – Faithless Elector unintended consequences edition

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Today we need to discuss the Chiafalo v. Washington, 591 U.S. _ (2020) ruling, and its (potential) unintended consequences. The ABA Journal (link above) notes earlier this year that “A 2020 U.S. Supreme Court decision on faithless electors appears to allow state legislatures to pursue a dangerous strategy for overturning election results…”

Those who read my posts–and my thrillers–know that I have long regarded the Electoral College as an outmoded, arcane system for electing a president; and one that is ripe for mischief from bad actors that only amplifies the anti-democratic underpinnings of our system. Those who claim to defend the Electoral College often say that they are upholding the Founders’ vision, when in fact they are working to exploit its loopholes and undermine faith in its legitimacy for their own ends.

Chiafalo v Washington was a unanimous Supreme Court decision “that states have the ability to enforce an elector’s pledge in presidential elections.” It is the suit that arose from the Faithless Electors lawsuit after the 2016 presidential election. The ABA article quotes a NY Times op-ed by Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School, and Matthew A. Seligman, a fellow at the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School.

In their op-ed, Lessig and Seligman’s describe an all-too possible scenario:
“Charges of fraud cloud a recount. Leaders in the state legislature challenge the presumptive result. In response to those challenges, the legislature votes to direct its electors to cast their ballots for the candidate who presumptively lost but whom the legislature prefers. Any elector voting contrary to the legislature’s rule would be removed and replaced with an elector who complied. This is a critical innovation in the science of stealing a presidential election.” [Emphasis mine]

Lessig and Seligman go on to say: “Congress could amend the federal law governing electoral votes by declaring that any post-election change of the results by a state legislature would not count as votes ‘regularly given,’” they wrote. “States could cement the requirement that electors are to follow the people’s will. Neither path is assured, but we are certain of this: It is a rocky road ahead.” As currently constituted, only the Senate would be likely to take this up. The House has a Trump-controlled majority.(And it is Trump-controlled. As we saw in the failure of the bipartisan Immigration Reform Bill after Trump torpedoed it. Brookings has an explainer “for the perplexed,” though in the end, it’s not hard to figure out.)

My first novel, Faithless Elector came out in early 2016 and presaged some of the insanity surrounding the election. But the third book, Emergency Powers may prove to be more on point (which does not make me feel good, somehow).

Voting is our chance to participate and to hold our elected officials to some sort of accountability. Is it perfect? Hardly, but we may get a lesson in just how bad the alternative is if we don’t vote–all of us. Because the last three years or more have seen a coordinated effort to undercut that chance to make outrvoices heard through bad faith laws, official skullduggery and lawsuits. So much so, that the GOP candidate, Donald Trump, can say, as he did on July 28 of this year, that we “won’t have to vote anymore…”

The election is roughly 3 months from now. The forces that seek to steal our votes have been busy for years. Perhaps knowing that a majority does not support their policies, the GOP has undertaken to shrink the number of eligible voters and (potentially) to usurp the role of Electors.

I’ll talk more about the lawsuits and gerrymandering that’s still going on–and the Supreme Court’s role in it–in a follow-up post.

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James McCrone is the author of the Imogen Trager political suspense-thrillers Faithless Elector, Dark Network , and Emergency Powers–noir tales about a stolen presidency, a conspiracy, and a nation on edge. Bastard Verdict, his fourth novel, is about a conspiracy surrounding a second Scottish Independence referendum. 

All books are available on BookShop.org, IndyBound.org, Barnes & Noble, your local bookshop, and Amazon. eBooks are available in multiple formats including Apple, Kobo, Nook and Kindle.

He’s a member of Mystery Writers of America, Int’l Assoc. of Crime Writers, and he’s the current president of the Delaware Valley chapter of Sisters in Crime. He lives in Philadelphia. James has an MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle. His current, work-in-progress is a mystery-thriller set in Oregon’s wine country…A (pinot) Noir, called Witness Tree.

For a full list of appearances and readings, make sure to check out his Events/About page. And follow this blog!

You can also keep up with James and his work on social media:
Mastodon: @JMcCrone
Bluesky: @jmccrone.bsky.social
Facebook: James McCrone author (@FaithlessElector)
and Instagram/Threads “@james.mccrone”

Secondary characters

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I used to daydream about writing for Law and Order back when it was still running*, not for its propulsive, plot-driven narratives, and certainly not its copaganda, but for the occasional, random, richly drawn secondary or even tertiary character(s); some random person who helps the plot along, but whom you probably won’t see again. True, there are a lot of stock interactions and tropes in Law and Order, like the one comedian John Mulaney has satirized as “guy who while being questioned by homicide detectives will not stop stocking crates…”, a kind of expository action-within-inaction reminiscent of the Sorkin walk, or any of HBO’s “sexposition” scenes.  

But occasionally, and the reason I wanted to write for Dick Wolf, the episodes will also give time to brief encounters with memorable criminals. Yes, I want to know whodunnit, but the cream in my coffee, the a la mode on my pie, are the people, the characters. I’m not talking about dramatic flashbacks, but about artful, iceberg-like, less-is-more character moments. One that sticks with me was a brief interchange between Briscoe and a heroin addict being held for questioning.

The heroin addict has been detained for hours, and he needs his fix—badly—and he’d very much like to leave, now that he’s told the police everything he knows. Briscoe makes some wisecrack about how much money the addict is spending on heroin, and the addict launches into a brief, surprisingly cogent, economic disquisition on how well heroin has held its value in the marketplace. “Pot, cocaine,” he says disdainfully, “the price per gram has doubled over the past few years, but heroin’s still right where it always was. Gram-for-gram, ounce-for-ounce, heroin’s still your best value.” Not even Briscoe had a comeback for this sage advice.

Why do I love those exchanges? Because in a world of formulaic television, strange, vivid, serendipitous encounters are the stuff of life. I’ve written elsewhere about how I try to remain alive to possibilities, and I write down moments and exchanges I’ve been party to or eavesdropped upon. I hold onto them because even though they’re real and therefore could mean anything (or nothing), they feel like more than what they are—and maybe someday I’ll have a place to use them.

I’ve been pleased, in Bastard Verdict, that the character of Alan Wilson, a young, up-and-coming, petty criminal in an organized crime gang, has caught on. I needed someone with underworld ties to make the story work, but I needed him to be more than a conduit for the plot. To put flesh on his bones (so to speak), I created a backstory for him (one I know but don’t go into great detail about), and introducing him, I ripped off an exchange from my long-past drug days, and a deal I made in a pub bathroom.

I’d gone into the bathroom to wait for my dealer. When he came in, he was aghast that I was just standing there. “At least pretend you’re taking a piss,” he said to me all those years ago.

But how and why do some secondary characters strike a chord with readers where others don’t?

I’ve been pleased that some of my secondary characters have resonated with readers. Though I as I noted in the WHAT I LEARNED interview with the Indy Author/Matty Dalrymple, I had hoped the lawyer, Ewan Johnston would have garnered a bit more attention.

I remember an early reading of Faithless Elector in Oxford, where a young woman from the audience that day came up to me afterwards, wondering if I was going to give the cab driver more “stage time” in a future book. “I’m sure he’ll be back!” she said. I was glad the cabby had “landed” but sad that Mr. Fitzwilliam, the super in Professor Calder’s building had not. I wanted Fitzwilliam to resonate as the kind of good, everyday person whom we might all hope would (collectively) be the bulwark against the kind of conspiracy that’s unfolding. I even gave him a kind of heartwarming joke but no one mentioned him in reviews.

Special Agent in Charge Amanda Vega in Dark Network gets good reviews, but I’d also hoped that the courier, Jimmy May, would have engendered similar affection. While no one disparaged him, no one said, “will he be back?” He was, in Emergency Powers, as was Vega. In Emergency Powers, I brought back the cabby, but I had really hoped that Kirsten, the waitress at a tiny, Midwest airport would gain more traction than she did. Again, I wanted to juxtapose her ordinary, everyday-ness with the dire things going on in the conspiracy.  Strangely, the bad guy, Frank Reed, even received some plaudits. I had one reader write to me to say how odd it was to be rooting for him.

I’m not sure why some secondary characters break through and others remain in the background, I’m pleased that the young criminal Alan Wilson, who becomes a kind of moral center in Bastard Verdict, seems to have become a favorite, with two reviewers expressing the hope that he’ll be back in a further installment.

I’ll see what I can do! 🙂

*Wait, L&O is back on the air?

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James McCrone is the author of the Imogen Trager political suspense-thrillers Faithless Elector, Dark Network , and Emergency Powers–noir tales about a stolen presidency, a conspiracy, and a nation on edge. All books are available on BookShop.org, IndyBound.org, Barnes & Noble, your local bookshop, and Amazon. eBooks are available in multiple formats including Apple, Kobo, Nook and Kindle.

His current book, Bastard Verdict, debuted on May 18th. A noir political thriller set in Scotland, it’s available through the link above, or wherever you buy your books. His current, work-in-progress is a mystery-thriller set in Oregon’s wine country…A (pinot) Noir, called Witness Tree.

A Seattle native (mostly), James now lives in South Philadelphia with his wife and three children. He’s a member of the The Mystery Writers of America, Int’l Assoc. of Crime Writers, Int’l Thriller Writers, Philadelphia Dramatists Center and is the vice-president of the Delaware Valley chapter of the Sisters in Crime network. James has an MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle.

For a full list of appearances and readings, make sure to check out his Events/About page. And follow this blog!

His most recent short fiction is below. The first is available for online reading.

“Eight O’Clock Sharp” in Retreats from Oblivion: the Journal of NoirCon. (free online)
Set in Philadelphia’s 9th Street Market, Thomas is a man outside of time, forgotten, but trying to do the right thing while contending with avaricious forces.

“Ultimatum Games” in Rock and Hard Place magazine issue #7
A rare book heist, bad decisions. The narrator and his partner-in-crime clash over evolving bourgeois norms.


“Nostalgia” in Low Down Dirty Vote, vol. 3
An armed group tries to resurrect a past that never was as they struggle with change.

Burnham and Orwell

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“Make Orwell fiction again!” became something of a meme during the Trump administration years. But for my sins (and unending reading pleasure!) I continue to dive into The Orwell Reader (Harcourt Brace 1956, 1984) swimming amidst the currents of his excerpted wit, insight and contrarian cantankerousness. We still need Orwell (and writers like him), pointing out corruption, bad faith, dissembling. My books are certainly very different–no talking farm animals, no aspidastra, no collectivist state, but the main characters are driven by their reaction to anti-democratic forces that try to chip away at and siphon off power. And while the conspirators in the #FaithlessElector series aren’t jack-booted thugs (yet), they are self-dealing elites who have coopted and corrupted politicians.

Recently in The Orwell Reader, I re-read Orwell’s cogent, withering critique of James Burnham’s work, The Managerial Revolution (1941). Orwell is dismayed that Burnham appears to want the militaristic state he describes as coming into being. Indeed, Orwell notes that, in Burnham’s 1941 edition, Burnham seems to be on the side of Nazi Germany. What struck me as I re-read Orwells’s point-by-point critique was that Burnam’s “managerialism” forms the intellectual scaffolding for the oligarchic collectivist state at the heart of 1984.

A bureaucratic collectivist state, like the one Burnham described as (hopefully?) coming into being in the 1940’s, “owns the means of production, while the surplus or profit is distributed among an elite party bureaucracy, rather than among the working class. Also, most importantly, it is the bureaucracy—not the workers, or the people in general—which controls the economy and the state. Thus, the system is not truly socialist, but it is not capitalist either.” [from Wikipedia]

In 1984, Orwell saw something in the lies, crimes and lack of accountability in Stalin’s, Hitler’s and Franco’s state capitalism—whatever they called it themselves—that looked like what Burnham described. Their regimes were about naked power, and in that pursuit they were prepared to subvert reality to their own purposes.

Many readers of the Faithless Elector series, (Faithless Elector, Dark Network and Emergency Powers) took the thrillers as a thematic repudiation of Trump. That’s true in a way, but Trump wasn’t even the Republican candidate for president when Faithless was published in March of 2016. The genesis for Faithless is far older than that. Rather, the background from which these books sprung existed long before Trump, and remains with us now.

We’re still living in the times depicted in Faithless and the other books, and we were living in it long before Trump barged onto the scene. What surprises readers of the Faithless Elector series (and this isn’t much of a spoiler) is that NEITHER of the major parties is orchestrating the plot. Rather, it is those who are parasitic on the parties that work the levers behind the scenes and buy useful idiots who believe they will reap the benefit.

Like housework, the job of democracy is never done, either because by its nature it’s messy and chaotic, or because power-hungry forces see a chance to supplant and usurp our role to hold our leaders accountable and to determine our own futures. I think of Bertolt Brecht’s play, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui:
“Don’t yet rejoice in his defeat, you men! Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard, The bitch that bore him is in heat again.”

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James McCrone is the author of the Imogen Trager political suspense-thrillers Faithless Elector, Dark Network , and Emergency Powers–noir tales about a stolen presidency, a conspiracy, and a nation on edge. All books are available on BookShop.org, IndyBound.org, Barnes & Noble, your local bookshop, and Amazon. eBooks are available in multiple formats including Apple, Kobo, Nook and Kindle.

His next book, Bastard Verdict (out 18-May-2023), is a noir political thriller set in Scotland. Bastard Verdict is available to reviewers through NetGalley

His current, work-in-progress is a mystery-thriller set in Oregon’s wine country…A (pinot) Noir, called Witness Tree.

A Seattle native (mostly), James now lives in South Philadelphia with his wife and three children. He’s a member of the The Mystery Writers of America, Int’l Assoc. of Crime Writers, Int’l Thriller Writers, Philadelphia Dramatists Center and is the vice-president of the Delaware Valley chapter of the Sisters in Crime network. James has an MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle.

For a full list of appearances and readings, make sure to check out his Events/About page. And follow this blog!

His most recent short fiction is below. The first is available for online reading.

“Eight O’Clock Sharp” in Retreats from Oblivion: the Journal of NoirCon. (free online)
Set in Philadelphia’s 9th Street Market, Thomas is a man outside of time, forgotten, but trying to do the right thing while contending with avaricious forces.

“Ultimatum Games” in Rock and Hard Place magazine issue #7
A rare book heist, bad decisions. The narrator and his partner-in-crime clash over evolving bourgeois norms.


“Nostalgia” in Low Down Dirty Vote, vol. 3
An armed group tries to resurrect a past that never was as they struggle with change.

Strong Characters

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I write about politics and institutions a great deal on this blog. I worry that my posts have made it seem that the Faithless Elector books are only political treatises. To be sure they are well researched and offer a chilling, insider take on Washington and our dismayingly enduring democratic deficit.

But they’re thillers.

As thrillers, they’re about characters in action. And a good many readers and reviewers have found the characters compelling and intriguing (see a sampling, below). My protagonist, FBI Agent Imogen Trager is a complex, driven character, a by-the-numbers (if rarely by-the-book) investigator who leads a strong, memorable cast. Taken together, the books weave high stakes, low politics, intricate motives and tense emotions into compelling, fast-paced stories that can be read individually or in order.

Imogen grew out of the first book, Faithless Elector, and during the re-writing/editing process, I realized she was a star. And like a star, she was stealing scenes and making others look bad! I deleted one character, and gave her his lines and discoveries, and switched a few other things around to make her more central. When I came to write the second book, Dark Network, I was excited because it would be wholly her book. In Emergency Powers, all the chickens come home to roost. And the whole cast—Imogen in particular—must confront their choices and their allegiances. (No chickens were actually harmed in the writing of this book 🙂

Here’s some of what reviewers and readers have said about the characters in the Faithless Elector series:

“McCrone’s ability to portray a heroine who makes both good and bad decisions is well-done, providing many action-packed and unexpected moments throughout.” — DIANE DONOVAN, Sr. Reviewer, Midwest Book Review

“Three tough female characters that steal the show: FBI agents Vega, Sartain, and Trager…shoulder much of the burden in this novel and deserve a large credit for why it succeeds.” -T. LIEBERMAN, Independent Book Review

Imogen Trager “wrangles with her demotion from golden girl to the FBI’s problem child while still trying to uncover the truth…It beautifully combines the bureaucracy of a spy thriller with the tantalising chase that’s usually seen in detective novels. -HANNAH STEVENSON, Dorset Book Detective

“A dynamic mix of political intrigue and high-stakes personal drama, offering keen portraits of true patriotism—its weight, its costs, and the courage that drives it.
— ART TAYLOR, Edgar Award-winning author of The Boy Detective & The Summer of ’74

“Couldn’t put it down. The tension just builds and builds. The book just sucked me in….and now I’m looking forward to the next!” radiostax (Amazon)

“Wonderful characters! But the key to the book is Imogen Trager – a dedicated FBI agent who’s willing to risk whatever it takes to save the country. You’ll love her. Highly recommended!” R. G. Belsky (Amazon)

Links to all the books are available in the bio below.

You can catch me online this Sunday, Aug. 1 at 3pm in conversation with Matty Dalrymple and Lisa Regan, hosted by the Mechanicsburg Mystery Bookshop;

AND I’ll be in New York City on Wednesday, Aug. 4, at KGB Bar (85 E 4th St) IN-PERSON and online for the MWA Reading Series, beginning at 7pm.

For a full list of appearances and readings, make sure to check out my Events/About page.

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James McCrone is the author of the Imogen Trager political suspense-thrillers Faithless Elector , Dark Network , and Emergency Powers–noir tales about a stolen presidency, a conspiracy, and a nation on edge. All books are available on BookShop.org, IndyBound.org, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon. eBooks are available in multiple formats including Apple, Kobo, Nook and Kindle.

  • James McCrone

His work, “Numbers Don’t Lie” also recently appeared in the 2020 short-story anthology Low Down Dirty Vote, vol. 2, and his short story “Ultimatum Games” will appear in Rock and a Hard Place in issue #7 this fall. His next book, w/t Bastard Verdict, is a noir political thriller set in Scotland.


A Seattle native (mostly), James now lives in South Philadelphia with his wife and three children. He’s a member of the The Mystery Writers of America, Int’l Assoc. of Crime Writers, Int’l Thriller Writers, Philadelphia Dramatists Center and is the newly elected vice-president of the Delaware Valley chapter of the Sisters in Crime network. James has an MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle.