Wisconsin Electors Gear up For Official Presidential Vote

Of course all of this stems from Donald Trump winning the Presidential election with 290 Electoral College votes to Hillary Clinton’s 232 while Clinton won the popular vote by at least a million votes. The electors, selected based on which party’s candidate wins the most votes in a state, meet in their respective states 41 days after the popular election.

President-elect Donald Trump said that he won the popular vote in the November 8 election if “millions” of illegal votes are excluded, hours after criticizing an effort to recount votes in three battleground states. The law will take effect nationally when it is enacted by states with a total of 105 more electoral votes.

Back when Trump and I were on the same side of this issue, I wrote in my October 24, 2012 column, “The Electoral College dropout”, the Electoral College was conceived at the Constitutional Convention to appease the slave-holding states of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia.

It’d be an exaggeration to say the president-elect endorsed doing away with the electoral college altogether – he didn’t go quite that far – but Trump nevertheless twice said yesterday that he sees the popular vote as “easier” and he’d “rather” have it than the alternative. For example, the state of Florida voted for both Trump and the GOP Senate candidate Marco Rubio. Reportedly there is a movement to deny Trump the presidency by electors refusing to cast their ballots for Trump when they meet on December 19. That will give him well over 300 electoral votes, a veritable electoral landslide. “They were steeped in classical history of Greece and Rome, and saw the danger of popular demagogues”. Depending on which candidate wins the plurality of the votes from a given state, that slate of electors will be the slate that casts their vote in that slate.

Elector Susan Moore of Pensacola, Fla., has been a Republican Party loyalist since she started volunteering in Tennessee when she was 12.

As it stands it is not known how many “faithless electors” there will be.

“The Kremlin probably expected that publicity surrounding the disclosures that followed the Russian government-directed compromises of emails from USA persons and institutions, including from United States political organisations, would raise questions about the integrity of the election process that could have undermined the legitimacy of the President-elect”, a senior administration official said.

In addition to the shifts in the Electoral College, another interesting point regarding the 2016 presidential results is that ballot splitting, a traditional American practice, was nearly non-existing.

Plus, even if the electors manage to block Trump from receiving 270 of the 538 votes, they would have to contend with the House of Representatives, which is Republican-led.

One elector, Michael Baca, said in a statement he wouldn’t vote for Trump.

Trump was elected by more than just racists and bigots, but those people were called so because the Clinton campaign framed the election as good people against hate. In 2000, Democrat Al Gore had 543,895 more popular votes than Republican George W. Bush, but I’m sure you remember how that turned out.

How do the states get their assigned Electoral College vote count? These areas, because of a variety of reasons including diversity, higher education levels, and ideology, tend to vote predominantly Democratic. These electors should and usually do respect their constituents and vote for the candidate chosen by the state; however, they are not required. In the past, there have been 157 faithless electors who changed their votes over 228 years.

He’s right. Kentucky is one of 28 states, according to the Congressional Research Service and additional USA TODAY research, that don’t mandate their electors to vote for the victor of their state’s popular vote.

These numbers are not simply a sign of hope.

Is the electoral college ideal?

Each state is allocated a number of electors equal to the number of its USA senators (always two) plus the number of its U.S. representatives (which may change each decade according to the size of each state’s population as determined in the Census).