We ask the members of the Electoral College meeting Monday to vote their consciences – not just their state’s vote.
Millions of Americans – including some Republicans – are terrified by the prospect that Donald Trump will actually take over the Oval Office in January.
Just over half of the states in our nation have enacted laws that instruct electors to vote for their party’s designated candidate. In the rest of states, the vote is completely up to the elector. Even in the states that tell their electors how to vote – like Tennessee – the penalties for disobeying tend to be modest and to go unenforced, according to most legal experts.
David Pozen, a professor at Columbia Law School, recently wrote in a New York Times opinion column that “as a matter of federal constitutional law, there is little basis for thinking that electors must side with their party’s candidate when that candidate carries the state. The Constitution says only that they ‘shall meet in their respective states and vote by ballot.'”
Alexander Hamilton, a framer of our democracy, wrote that the Electoral College would allow the presidency to be decided “by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation.”
Pozen notes that pledged electors have rarely used their discretion, but this is an extraordinary time. We agree.
Hillary Clinton received nearly 3 million votes more than Trump, and allegations of Russian interference and manipulation as well as voter intimidation and suppression cloud Trump’s victory. But more worrisome is Trump’s demonstrated lack of fitness for the office.
Trump himself is every bit the demagogue Hamilton described when he laid out the purpose for the Electoral College. The American Civil Liberties Union has aptly dubbed Trump “a one-man constitutional crisis” who empowers white nationalists, conflates his business interests with the public good and is openly contemptuous of the rule of law.
“In light of these allegations, the [elector] practice of sticking with the state’s top vote-getter loses moral force. It cannot override a more basic obligation to preserve the country and the Constitution,” Pozen writes.
The New York Times editorial board, too, urges electors “to deny Donald Trump the presidency – as the Constitution allows and as the Founding Fathers envisioned for a candidate so antithetical to their aspirations for the nation’s highest office.”
The Times, too, quotes Hamilton, noting that he almost seemed to have anticipated Trump, a rich developer and reality show host as he laid out a process to guard against someone with ‘Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity.'”
Trump shows us this with his every action. He plans to treat being president as a part-time job while he keeps a stake in his business and remains executive producer of reality TV’s “Celebrity Apprentice.” He finds time to tweet insults and meet with celebrities like Kanye West while he blows off intelligence briefings designed to prepare him to be the leader of the free world.
His senior advisers and cabinet nominees are frightening in and of themselves: a chief strategist who by his own admission built an online platform for white supremacy, a national security adviser who spreads false conspiracy theories, a secretary of state with business dealings with Russia and a friendship medal from Vladimir Putin, an education secretary hostile to public education, climate deniers to dismantle the EPA and Department of Energy.
And don’t forget Russia – with which Trump himself has many business ties – and the growing knowledge of Putin’s manipulation to elect Trump.
This is exactly the kind of debacle for which Hamilton designed the Electoral College.
Electors could choose Clinton, who won the popular vote, or they could choose a compromise Republican candidate, or they could simply deny Trump the 270 votes he needs. In that case, as the Constitution specifies, the House of Representatives would elect a president.
Please, electors. Spare us from Trump.