VON BULOW: “At last, I said to him: ‘Well, tell me, at least, how it all happened.’ He (Bethmann-Hollweg) raised his long, thin arms to heaven and answered in a dull, exhausted voice: ‘Oh — if we only knew!’
In many later polemics on ‘war-guilt’ I have often wished it had been possible to produce a snapshot of Bethmann-Hollweg standing there at the moment he said those words.”
They submitted the alternate slate of electors in case Congress refused to accept certain states electors because of the possibility of fraud in a state.
If they had thrown out a state’s electors that risked that state not having a say in the electoral college electing the president. The alternate slate of electors would have protected a state from that.
They openly submitted them to Congress; it was no secret scheme. Would a car thief go to the motor vehicle dept and try and submit an alternate registration KNOWING there is already a registration on file, and openly admitting it to the clerk?
That was the only reason they did it. There is/was no criminal intent.