The presidential election of 2016 is over, and Donald Trump was the winner… Or was he?
If one knows anything about presidential elections, one should be aware that the contest held on Election Day is merely aimed at choosing participants in the Electoral College, who will be the people charged with the actual voting for president on December 19, today, five and a half weeks after the first vote took place. Currently, a 270-vote majority of electors is required for a candidate to be declared President of the United States.
But is it possible that such a majority might not be reached? Or is it possible that electors could vote differently from the way American citizens voted on November 8?
The answer to both of these questions is yes. In the first scenario, the election of the president would be passed to the House of Representatives — as it was in the race of 1824 — which can choose between the first-, second- and third-place finishers in the Electoral College vote.
The second scenario involves what are called “faithless electors” — members of the Electoral College who choose not to cast their votes according to pledges they made to their parties when they were chosen as electors.
There’s no federal law against members of the Electoral College becoming faithless electors. However, some states have monetary penalties for such behavior, although their amounts are typically small.
Mostly, the cost of being a faithless elector is the damage done to one’s reputation as typically, electors are trusted, longtime members of the political party that appointed them.
Throughout the history of American elections, there have only been 179 faithless electors, and 71 of those coincided with occasions of a candidate’s death prior to the electoral vote taking place. Since 2000, there have only been two faithless electors — one in the District of Columbia in the presidential election of 2000 and an accidental one in 2004.
Although Hillary Clinton gave a concession speech on November 9 and purportedly agreed to unconditionally accept the results of the vote, she later helped sponsor a recount effort led by third-party candidate Jill Stein of the Green Party. Some people say the money for this recount effort came from deep-pocketed Democratic billionaire donor George Soros.
This effort, initially undertaken in the states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, was in the hope of correcting or discovering enough votes to overturn all three states’ results, which would have had the effect of flipping enough electoral votes to Clinton to make her the winner instead of Donald Trump.
But the recount in Pennsylvania was disallowed by the state court system, and the effort in Wisconsin actually ended up giving an extra 131 votes to candidate Trump. In Michigan, Clinton was only able to pick up a measly 102 votes. Thus, no changes were made to the number of electors for either Clinton or Trump.
Predictably, there have been myriad calls by Democrats since the election to eliminate the Electoral College; some have referred to it as a holdover from 18th-century politics. But this would take a Constitutional amendment to effect and is unlikely to occur in the near future.
Ever the sore loser, Clinton has one additional chance — however remote — to claim victory, and that’s by convincing enough members of the Electoral College to become faithless.
It’s an extremely steep climb; Trump’s expected margin of victory is 74 votes from a 306 to 232 result. Therefore, in order to reach 270, Clinton would have to convince a virtually insurmountable collection of 37 electors to alter their votes.
Most political analysts say the chances of this happening are astronomical, especially given the numbers of faithless electors in elections past. But that hasn’t stopped Clinton, Soros and others at making a valiant attempt.
Various articles, op-eds and social media posts have tried to convince people to sign petitions urging electors to switch their votes for all kinds of reasons. Some academics say that Trump has business conflicts of interest or is afflicted by intellectual immaturity.
Another argument commonly cited is Clinton’s popular vote margin of at least 2.8 million ballots. But those who understand how the Constitution works know that presidential elections are not determined by the popular vote and that this was intentional on the part of the Founding Fathers.
An effort by Professor (and one-time 2016 presidential candidate) Lawrence Lessig of Harvard Law School to offer free legal counsel to electors to “vote their conscience” and deny Trump the presidency has been hastily deployed. Some say this effort also is being financed by Soros; the group managing it is known to be connected to PR firm Megaphone, which has ties to both Soros and Hillary Clinton through one of its board members, Vien Truong.
What’s been less talked about is that electors in many cases are being harassed by left-wing protestors, who have attempted to communicate with them via email, over the phone and in person, in some cases issuing death threats to electors if they dare vote for Trump. One elector said she had received 50,000 emails since her name was made public. Another said he had received death threats via Facebook and Twitter.
As of December 14, Professor Lessig claimed that “Surveying the three groups that are supporting Republican electors, we believe there are 20 [electors willing to become faithless] right now — some tell me the number is higher than that; it should be more like 30 — but I feel confident in saying there’s at least 20.” Lessig claimed that those privately considering their options might push the number above 37, and if this happens, “there will be a very interesting dynamic.”
But so far, Lessig has produced no evidence of his claims, which the Republican Party has denounced as baseless. Only one Republican elector has gone public with his intention to switch his vote; elector Chris Suprun of Texas stated he believes Trump is unqualified to lead and will not cast his vote for him.
Even if 37 Republican electors were to abandon Trump, in some states their votes wouldn’t be counted while in others they would be replaced by alternate electors who almost certainly would back Trump. The upshot of this is that the election would probably go to the House of Representatives, which is Republican-dominated, and Trump would likely be elected anyway.
Currently, there’s a laughable two-minute-long “Hail Mary” video clip, featuring entertainers Martin Sheen, Noah Wyle and Moby imploring electors to become faithless while poignant piano music plays making the rounds on social media. It will likely become one of the more comedic artifacts of the 2016 election.
Given the extremely tight timeframe of the vote and the huge margin of Trump’s electors, these last-minute actions are almost certainly doomed to fail. However, that hasn’t stopped some media personalities such as progressive filmmaker Michael Moore and others from predicting a December 19 “surprise” and that it might be possible that “Donald Trump does not become the president,” in Moore’s words.
It’s true that the Clintons are not known for throwing in the towel. And it’s also true that their campaign war chest dwarfed Donald Trump’s, and the pressure of globalist billionaires to reverse the election result is sky-high.
Still, in the end, 37 electors is a giant number; even if you offered each of them a $100 million bribe, it might not be enough to ensure victory. (And if you did, there would almost surely be no way for them to effectively hide the evidence of such a “gift”).
Not many people are predicting an electoral result that’s any different from that of November 8. Mostly, the efforts of Democrats since then are just more evidence of 2016 sour grapes.
