A survey released on Sunday (18 December) suggests that over half of Republican Party voters in the U.S. think that Donald Trump won the popular vote along with the electoral collage.
Advertisement
Another Michigan elector, Michael Banerian, the youth vice-chair of the Michigan Republican Party, said he has even received death threats from anti-Trump forces. He trails Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes nationwide, which makes a mockery of his claim of a popular mandate and underscores the need for a constitutional amendment to abolish the electoral college and provide for the election of the president by a national popular vote.
If Trump were to lose the electoral college vote it would be up to the House of Representatives – controlled by Republicans – to designate the successor to President Barack Obama.
It would take 37 Electoral College members to cancel out Trump’s majority electoral votes.
Asked about the odds of his effort succeeding, Suprun said “until we start casting ballots, there’s still a lot of time left for us to work”.
“If only 37 Republican electors change their vote, Donald Trump will not have the 270 electoral votes he needs to be president”, Chiafalo said in a video explaining the objective of the Electoral College.
Indeed, in this recent election Hillary Clinton carried six of the 11 least populous states – Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Delaware and Hawaii – but probably will still lose the Electoral College. While most rural counties voted for Trump this November, rural America constitutes less than 20 percent of the country’s population. (More than half of states have such laws in place.) In one case, a couple of rogue Democratic electors are trying to sway their Republican counterparts to instead vote for a moderate Republican.
“I have more mail than Santa”, said Lee Snover, an elector and chairwoman of the Northampton County Republican Committee, adding that she’s received more than 10,000 emails and was sent a copy of the Federalist Papers, which includes an essay detailing an argument on the objective of the Electoral College.
Mr. Kasich, who lost his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, has urged Republican electors not to vote for him. Defenders of the Electoral College also argue that the system protects small states. Both Clinton and Trump competed (and tailored their campaign strategies) to win electoral votes in what amounted to 51 separate statewide contests.
The electors are hardly household names.
Suprun, a paramedic and lifelong Republican who first announced he would not vote for Trump in a December 5 New York Times Op-Ed piece, said he believes the president-elect “lacks the foreign policy experience to serve as commander-in-chief” and is troubled by Trump’s penchant to attack others on Twitter.
Also Wednesday, a new UtahPolicy.com poll shows a majority of Utahns oppose doing away with the Electoral College so the presidency is decided by popular vote.
Courts in Colorado and Washington state have rejected pleas from electors to be released from requirements to vote as their states did, although the electors in Colorado appealed the lower court ruling, according to The Associated Press. “We’re saying: “You’re an agent of the Constitution, not an agent of the state” when you’re placing this vote”. This year’s Hamiltonians will likely fail, in part because many states now require electors to mechanically follow the popular vote in their states.
Even people who aren’t electors but are close to them are coming under fire.
Advertisement
The Republican electors who chose to break from their states’ popular votes have been offered free legal counsel by Harvard constitutional law professor Lawrence Lessig and law firm Durie Tangri.
