Inside Job by Steven Rosenfeld

Author:Steven Rosenfeld
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hot Books
Published: 2018-02-12T05:00:00+00:00

16

THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE

THE RECOUNTS EXPOSED MORE UNSAVORY FEATURES of American elections. Yet, as has been the case for years, election officials grudgingly accepted these slights as an inevitable part of the process. The recount’s shortcomings joined the list of Election Day impediments compiled by groups like the League of Women Voters, whose post-2016 Wisconsin report cited many incidents of voters being shuffled between polls, confusion over voter ID requirements, and provisional ballots. In a state with millions voting however, hundreds of random victims were seen as an unfortunate but not outcome-changing cost to be tolerated.

Nonetheless, the cumulative toll of a presidential campaign that was widely called one of the “worst ever” kept prompting people to look for a final way to stop Trump. As the recounts churned along, the Republican Party’s members of their state Electoral College prepared to meet in their Capitol buildings to ratify the presidential results. That led to an effort by a group called the Hamilton Electors, named after Alexander Hamilton, who argued that the GOP’s almost-final gatekeepers owed it to their country to reject Trump and pick someone else.

“I am asked to cast a vote on Dec. 19 for someone who shows daily he is not qualified for the office,” wrote Christopher Suprun, a Texas paramedic and Republican elector, for The New York Times’ opinion page. “The election of the next president is not yet a done deal. Presidential electors have the legal right and constitutional duty to vote their conscience. I believe electors should unify behind a Republican alternative.”257

Suprum’s Electoral College brethren did not respond to his call to arms. In fact, the only electors to reject their party’s nominee were a few Democrats who abandoned Clinton. That left one final possibility, urging members of Congress to reject the Electoral College’s vote for ratification in its joint session in early January. The last time members of both chambers rose to block the ratification was in 2005. That January, Ohio’s Rep. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones and California’s Sen. Barbara Boxer forced the House and the Senate to return to their chambers for a two-hour debate, where they heard now-familiar complaints about voter suppression. As in 2005, civil rights activists urged the Congressional Black Caucus to take the lead.

“We are writing to you as a member of the Black Caucus to ask you to file an objection before January 6, 2017, when you and your colleagues reconvene to count and authenticate the ill-gotten votes that some electors cast for Donald Trump,” Ruby Sales, Amy Billingsley, and Ann Massaro wrote. “Whether you realize it or not, there is another powder keg that is percolating in Black, Brown, and progressive communities who voted in large numbers for Secretary Clinton only to have their votes stolen and disregarded not only by Republicans but seemingly by Democrats.”258

Their letter cited the seventy-five thousand Michigan ballots lacking votes for president, the “massive non-count of ballots in Milwaukee [that] doubtless contain the tally that defeated Mr. Trump,” and “missing tally from communities of color” in Pennsylvania, among anti-voter actions.

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