Stop Trying to Convince Trump Electors Not to Vote for Trump; It Will Do Nothing But Set a Horrible Precedent

A group of people calling themselves “Hamilton Electors” (named after the musical bio star subject and author of The Federalist #68, which explains the basis for and role of the Electoral College) got together after the election and started agitating for Trump’s Presidential Electors not to vote for him, but to instead vote for Hillary Clinton.  Simply writing that down explicitly illuminates how stupid that is — “Trump Electors” are chosen by the Republican Parties within the various states with the express purpose of voting for Trump — and asking them to support Hillary is madness.  (Eventually, the Hamilton Electors seem to have figured this last part out, and most have given up on trying to elect Hillary and are instead focusing on trying to elect “sane Republican” John Kasich.  He’d be a better President than Trump — but that’s not going to happen.  Electors could no longer obtain life insurance after doing so.)

The basis for this idea is that the Constitution allows Electors to vote for whomever they please, although this has happened extremely rarely.  I don’t think that I can improve on Wikipedia for the history report:

On 22 occasions, 179 electors have not cast their votes for President or Vice President as prescribed by the legislature of the state they represented. Of those, 71 electors changed their votes because the candidate to whom they were pledged died before the electoral ballot (1872, 1912). Two electors chose to abstain from voting for any candidate (1812, 2000).  The remaining 106 were changed by the elector’s personal interest, or perhaps by accident. Usually, the faithless electors act alone. An exception was the 1836 election, in which all 23 Virginia electors acted together.

The 1836 election was the only occasion when faithless electors altered the outcome of the electoral college vote. The Democratic ticket won states with 170 of the 294 electoral votes, but the 23 Virginia electors abstained in the vote for Vice President, so the Democratic nominee, Richard M. Johnson, got only 147 (exactly half), and was not elected. However, Johnson was elected Vice President by the U.S. Senate.

Faithlessness of Electors has never come close to determining the outcome of a Presidential race.  If all Democrats voted for Kasich — which won’t happen, because of a similar life insurability problem — and 38 Republicans did so as well, then Kasich would indeed be elected.  But if instead 38 Republicans voted for Kasich and no or only some Democratic votes changed, then the election would go to the House of Representatives, with the House members choosing from among Trump, Clinton, and Kasich.

Well, actually that’s not quite true, because there’s a fourth candidate who could win in such circumstances: Mike Pence.  If the House could not reach an agreement on who would become President, then Pence (who would probably himself have received a majority of the Electoral Votes) would become President, and would nominate a new Vice-President to be confirmed by the Senate.  My guess is that this is more likely than either Clinton or Kasich winning via such a process.  (The Senate could also vote for Tim Kaine — it won’t — or for no one, in which event Speaker of the House Paul Ryan would ascend to the Presidency.  Even this is more likely than Hillary Clinton winning.)

To clarify, the election “going to the House” does not mean a vote of all 435 members of the House.  Instead, it’s a vote of State Delegations in the new 115th Congress (which will have taken office on January 3) — where Wyoming’s at-large representative Liz Cheney — yes, LIZ CHENEY — will have as much say as the majority of California’s 53 Representatives (who break 34-19 Democratic) and more say than Maine, whose delegation (if they vote along party lines) will be deadlocked and unable to cast a vote.  As Republicans control 32 of the state delegations to the Democrats’ 17, it’s a foregone conclusion that they would choose a Republican.

As for this argument, there’s an argument that the 20th Amendment could justify Congress refusing to recognize the Electoral Votes — Russian interference in the election process has been cited as a possible basis for this, although if it is the equivalent of an “independent expenditure” then I don’t see how that could possibly work — but I haven’t analyzed it.  A 1995 Supreme Court decision not to overturn a federal judge’s removal of a State Senate candidate over alleged voter fraud is being bandied about as a decision that would suffice.  It does not look like a particularly good precedent — but the notion that the President-Elect could be ousted because of what some third party did without his or her knowledge seems fundamentally unjust.  It might lead in the future to BOTH sides ensuring that some illegal activities took place ostensibly to elect the other side, with said activities providing a plausible (or at least plausible enough) fig leaf for Congress to derail the election of someone that it dislikes.  We don’t need that.

There’s more to be said — such as discussing rioting by Trump supporters if this were actually to be tried, and perhaps assassinations of Members of Congress and the Cabinet during this period — but I’ll leave that alone for now.  The only good thing about a 25th Amendment solution, from a Democratic perspective, is that it would likely leave the Republican rather than the Democratic party in tatters.

Of course, that’s what we thought would happen given Trump’s campaign … and it didn’t.  And at any rate, we’re in bad enough shape as it is from the attempt to “steal the election” — and that’s what we’d be doing, even if it’s technically permitted, because it’s the Electoral College rather than the popular vote that determines the Presidency and we’d be screaming ourselves bloody if the situation were reversed — that has already been established as a precedent to be cited by those who in the future may also try to find away around “the will of the people,” as strained through the crooked pathway of the Constitution’s rules.

And the joke of it is: we’d likely be doing all of this simply in order to replace Trump with Pence.  No thanks.