The electoral voters speak and they’re not out for a revolt
Published 8:44 am Thursday, December 15, 2016
WASHINGTON — Although pestered to a fare-thee-well to abandon Donald Trump, Republican electors appear to be in no mood for an insurrection in the presidential campaign’s last voting ritual. This most untraditional of elections is on course to produce a traditional outcome Monday — an Electoral College ticket to the White House for the president-elect.
Whether they like Trump or not, and some surely don’t, scores of the Republicans chosen to cast votes in the state-capital meetings told AP they feel bound by history, duty, party loyalty or the law to rubber-stamp their state’s results and make him president. Appeals numbering in the tens of thousands — drowning inboxes, ringing cell phones, stuffing home and office mailboxes with actual handwritten letters — have not swayed them.
The Associated Press tried to reach all 538 electors and interviewed more than 330 of them, finding widespread Democratic aggravation with the electoral process but little expectation that the hustle of anti-Trump maneuvering can derail him. For that to happen, Republican-appointed electors would have to stage an unprecedented defection and Democrats would need to buck tradition, too, by peeling away from Hillary Clinton and swinging behind a consensus candidate in sufficient numbers.
Still, people going to the typically ho-hum electoral gatherings have been drawn into the rough and tumble of campaign-season politics. Republicans are being beseeched to revolt in a torrent of lobbying, centered on the argument that Clinton won the popular vote and Trump is unsuited to the presidency. Most of it is falling on deaf ears, but it has also led to some acquaintances being made across the great political divide.
“Let me give you the total as of right now: 48,324 emails about my role as an elector,” said Brian Westrate, a small-business owner and GOP district chairman in Fall Creek, Wisconsin. “I have a Twitter debate with a former porn star from California asking me to change my vote. It’s been fascinating.”
Similarly deluged, Republican elector Hector Maldonado, a Missouri National Guardsman, has taken the time to console one correspondent, a single mother and Air Force veteran who is beside herself with worry about what a Trump presidency will mean.
“Everything’s going to be OK,” he said he told her. “I know you’re scared, but don’t worry. Everything’s going to be OK. And I know that it will be.”
Maldonado, a Mexican immigrant and medical-equipment seller in Sullivan, backed Ted Cruz in the primaries but will cast his vote for Trump with conviction. “I took an oath once to become a U.S. citizen,” he said, “and on Aug. 14, 1995, that was the first oath that I’ve taken to support the U.S. Constitution. A year later I took the oath again, to support the duties of being an officer in the U.S. Army. This was the third oath that I’ve taken to execute what I promised to do.”
Even a leader of the anti-Trump effort, Bret Chiafalo of Everett, Washington, calls it a “losing bet” — but one he says the republic’s founders would want him to make. “I believe that Donald Trump is a unique danger to our country and the Founding Fathers put the Electoral College in place to, among other things, stop that from happening,” said Chiafalo, 38, an Xbox network engineer who backed Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries.
It takes 270 electoral votes to make a president. Despite losing the national popular vote, Trump won enough states to total 306 electoral votes. He would need to see three dozen fall away for him to lose his majority. Only one Republican elector told AP he won’t vote for Trump.