NASHVILLE – Tennessee’s 11 Electoral College members formally cast their votes for President Donald Trump on Monday in a process notably calmer than four years earlier, when shouting protesters at times disrupted proceedings.
While Republican Trump handily carried Tennessee on Nov. 3 with 60.7% of the vote over Democrat Joe Biden, Biden nationally has won 306 electoral votes with 232 votes going to Trump. It takes 270 votes to be elected president.
Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, told the electors that he felt “privileged standing here at a historic moment in our nation” and that the republic’s election process has made the country “the greatest nation in the world in part for what happens right here today, the fact that we are a government of the people.”
The fact that the nation continues to “move from one elected official to another and another for generations is the very thing that sets us apart and makes us unique,” Lee added.
Tennessee Republican electors were appointed by the Tennessee GOP’s State Executive Committee with the concurrence of the Trump campaign. Electors individually represent one of Tennessee’s nine congressional districts, while two others represent the entire state.