Interesting that the question assumes the pardon and acquittal make it not matter anymore. But the fake electors scheme matters for political accountability and historical record regardless of criminal consequences. Historians will care. Congress could care if they developed a spine. Voters *should* care about how close we came to a constitutional breakdown, even if Trump himself faces zero legal jeopardy now.

The scheme mattered because it was coordinated across multiple state parties, involved specific elected officials knowingly submitting fraudulent documents, and was clearly designed to exploit ambiguities in the Electoral Count Act. That it ultimately failed doesn't make it a cute footnote - it makes it a dry run. And now we've learned the system's vulnerabilities while the architect faces no consequences and faces voters again. That's a problem worth discussing independent of Trump's legal status.

The pardon is a political fact. The scheme's strategic and constitutional significance is a separate fact. Conflating them - treating the pardon as making everything null and void - is giving up on understanding what actually happened.

It doesn't. Next question. If he's been acquitted and pardoned then the legal system has spoken. We can argue about whether that's fair, but the "scheme still matters" framing assumes courts should keep pursuing someone after they've been exonerated. That's not how the law works.

If you want to convince people the scheme was bad, win elections. That's the remedy here.

The fake electors scheme matters because it reveals the infrastructure that would be used in a second Trump term. We're not talking about one guy's bad judgment - we're talking about an organized effort to subvert state election processes. The pardon doesn't make that historical fact disappear, and it doesn't mean the next time will fail the same way it did in 2020.

People keep fixating on whether Trump faces consequences as the measure of whether something matters. That's backwards. What matters is whether the public understands what happened and whether those systems get reinforced against future attacks. A pardon can erase criminal liability. It can't erase the pattern.

The fake electors scheme mattered on January 6th because it was the actual mechanism being deployed. It matters now because we need to understand how close this came to working - Raffensperger held the line in Georgia, but what if he hadn't? What if the next Secretary of State is more cooperative? The pardon is a political outcome. The scheme was a structural vulnerability in our elections system.