This ain’t an average Electoral Vote — but it’s probably going to end like one.
With the final vote to elect Donald Trump as the next President of the United States one day away, red state electors are facing unprecedented pressure to do something — anything — to keep him from taking power.
Even so, the Monday vote seems ready to go according to plan.
Republican electors nationwide have faced protests and thousands of calls to flip their votes, and some say they now even need police protection to cast ballots.
“This is stupid,” Ahs Khare, a Pennsylvania elector, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about the uproar.
He said he and the state’s 19 other Republican electors have been assigned a state police trooper ahead of the vote.
“Nobody is standing up and telling these (protesters), ‘Enough, knock it off,’” Khare said.
A Louisiana elector, Kay Kellogg Katz, told the Shreveport Times she has received 40,000 emails since Election Day — with many begging her to vote for Hillary Clinton, John Kasich or no one at all.
The Electoral College vote usually happens with little fanfare, as electors cast votes aligning with the electoral map for a presidential election. That means 306 electors are expected to vote for Trump, and 232 will vote for Clinton, the Democratic nominee.
But the 2016 vote, of course, just can’t be that easy.
Calls for a college overthrow started almost immediately after Trump emerged victorious on Election Day, despite losing the popular vote by nearly three millions votes.
Within days, one Michigan elector told the Detroit News he was getting death threats.
Ahead of the Monday vote, several GOP electors have publicly announced plans to vote against Trump. Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig claimed last week, without giving specifics, he knows of at least 20 electors who are planning to snub Trump.
At least 37 Republican electors would have to deny Trump their vote for him to lose the electoral majority. In that case, the House of Representatives, which is led by Republicans, would vote for the next President.
Despite all the college chaos, the vast majority of electors have said they plan to vote exactly as they are expected to — and put Trump in the White House.
The Associated Press interviewed 330 of the 538 electors, and found only one Republican planning to break from Trump. No election in American history has ever seen more than one of these so-called “faithless” electors.
Otherwise, most electors have made clear an anti-Trump uprising won’t happen come Monday.
“There is zero chance of that,” Pennsylvania elector Lawrence Tabas told the Post-Gazette.
“If you want to place a bet on that in Vegas, you can make enough money to retire.”
“He said he and the state’s 19 other Republican electors have been assigned a state police trooper ahead of the vote.”
They didn’t need them after all.
Thanks for raising my hopes… BAST@RDS!!!