Electoral College death threats won’t be the last bid to overturn the election

Posted: Dec 16, 2016

The Electoral College is due to meet Monday, when the electors chosen on Nov. 8 will establish Donald Trump as the winner. Then Democrats’ efforts to steal the election will finally come to an end — right? Don’t bet on it. So bitter are American liberals that they may go down as the sorest losers since the invention of democracy. They’re apt to try anything to overturn voters’ decision. Certainly Election Day didn’t stop them, even though the Electoral College outcome was unambiguous, a landslide indicating that Donald Trump had secured 306 electoral votes to the 232 won by the Democratic nominee. To the losers, that was a mere sideshow — something to be overturned somehow, anyhow. First we got Jill Stein’s demand for a recount in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — in none of which had she won more than 1.2 percent of the vote. In all the comment about this, none has quite captured how demented Dr. Stein’s recount campaign is. She cajoled her backers to put up millions of dollars on the theory that the wrong one of her adversaries won. Hillary Clinton jumped on board by sending representatives to help monitor the recount, even though she had conceded the election in a dead-of-election-night call to Trump. In Wisconsin, the recount resulted in a 131-vote gain for Trump. In Pennsylvania, a federal judge, Paul Diamond, issued an opinion suggesting the suspicion that the state’s vote was hacked “borders on the irrational.” He warned that the recount could leave “all” of the state’s 6 million voters “disenfranchised.” Before Michigan’s recount was halted, it had uncovered serious discrepancies only in Detroit — multiple precincts that apparently saw more votes cast than actual voters. Some have noted that Stein raised far more cash to “support” her recount effort than she actually spent on it. In Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, her own vote exceeded the margin by which Trump defeated Clinton. Had she not run, most of her votes likely would have gone to the Democrat. The poor doctor may just be consumed by guilt. How, though, to explain the Democrats’ behavior once the recount strategy failed? Now we have all sorts of efforts to suborn the Electoral College into abandoning the will of the voters. The calls by Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, for the CIA to brief the 538 members of the Electoral College are the least of it. There’s a cataract of harassment hitting GOP electors; it’s reported in an astounding story in The Post. It quotes one Michigan GOP elector, Michael Banerian, as saying, “Somebody threatened to put a bullet in the back of my mouth.” Meantime, a group called the Electors Trust is offering legal advice to electors who want to break with the voters. This even though NPR quotes one of its founders as saying electors are “legally free” but “morally obligated to vote as they are pledged.” He just suggests there might be countervailing moral obligations if an elector thinks a candidate unfit. Another professor, writing in the New York Times, suggests that the Founding Fathers wanted the electors to be free agents. It may be the first time in history that the Times got someone to back the original intent of the Founders. Then again, the Founders hadn’t reckoned with the rise of political parties, which they feared. So the professor’s argument really boils down to whether the electors should be faithless to the voters or the Founders — or both. The inchoate desperation of all this is what leads to the question of what might happen after Trump wins the electoral vote on Monday. Then what could depressed and desperate Democrats do? Well, it turns out that after the Electoral College acts, its votes have to be certified. The United States Code requires this to be done by the two houses of Congress, starting at 1 p.m. on the sixth day of January. Normally, this is a sedate affair, taking an hour or so. It’s hard to see how Trump and the voters who cast their ballots for him could be denied a victory. But it’s not hard to see how it could be turned into a circus. As soon as the president of the Senate — Vice President Joe Biden — announces the electoral vote result, the federal law governing the procedure requires him to immediately call for objections. It only takes objections by one member of the House and one of the Senate to force a vote by each house on the issue. (Ohio’s votes were challenged in 2004.) Each member gets five minutes to sound off; both houses have to agree to disqualify an elector. It won’t actually change anything: Since both houses are controlled by Republicans, it’s hard to see how Trump loses. But that might not stop Democrats from having one last emotional breakdown in the world’s greatest deliberative body. ;