President-elect
Donald Trump, flanked by his wife, Melania, and Senate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell of Ky., gives a thumbs-up on Capitol Hill in Washington,
Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016, after their meeting. (Photo: Molly Riley/AP)
The
election of Donald Trump as president is a bitter pill to swallow for
millions of Americans — and some are backing a quixotic campaign to
reverse that outcome.
As
of Friday afternoon, more than 2.4 million people had signed a petition
to the U.S. Electoral College, urging its members to ignore their
states’ votes and cast their ballots for former Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton.
“Mr.
Trump is unfit to serve. His scapegoating of so many Americans, and his
impulsivity, bullying, lying, admitted history of sexual assault, and
utter lack of experience make him a danger to the Republic,” wrote
Elijah Berg, who launched the petition on Change.org.
Berg,
of North Carolina, argued that the Electoral College can award the
White House to either candidate and should use its own “most
undemocratic” institution to ensure a “democratic result.”
Berg
continued: “24 states bind electors. If electors vote against their
party, they usually pay a fine. And people get mad. But they can vote
however they want and there is no legal means to stop them in most
states.”
Protesters
against President-elect Donald Trump march peacefully through Oakland,
Calif., on Nov. 9, 2016. (Photo: Noah Berger/Reuters)
Another petition on Faithlessnow.com
similarly calls for more than 160 Republican electors to set aside
their votes in states that don’t have laws binding them to do so:
Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana,
Missouri, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and West
Virginia. The petition has assembled a list of the relevant electors.
Clinton
is the first presidential candidate since 2000 to win the popular vote
while losing the White House. In that year, Al Gore lost the Electoral
College to George W. Bush. While Americans were still waiting to see
whether Gore or Bush had won Florida’s 25 electoral votes, Clinton, the
first lady at the time, called for the college to be disbanded so that
no one would ever have to doubt again whether his or her vote counted.
“We are a very different country than we were 200 years ago,” she said then.
“I believe strongly that in a democracy, we should respect the will of
the people and to me, that means it’s time to do away with the Electoral
College and move to the popular election of our president.”
And
in a deep twist of irony, Trump has also called for the Electoral
College to be abandoned. On the eve of the 2012 election, between
President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney, Trump called the
Electoral College “a disaster for a democracy.”
After
that election, in a tweet he has since deleted, Trump said, “The phoney
[sic] electoral college made a laughing stock out of our nation. The
loser one! [sic]” Trump tweeted this at a time when he thought Romney
would win the popular vote, which ultimately was not the case.
The last time Gallup checked to see whether Americans would vote for a law to abolish the Electoral College was in 2013 — and 63 percent said they would.
So
what is the Electoral College, exactly? American citizens did not in
fact elect a president on Nov. 8; they chose electors. On Dec. 19, the
538 electors of the Electoral College will cast their ballots for a
candidate and ultimately decide the next resident of 1600 Pennsylvania
Ave.
The authors of the Constitution established this system for two reasons.
First,
the founding fathers intended the Electoral College to serve as a
buffer between the electorate and the presidency. They feared that a
tyrant or someone incompetent would be able to manipulate the population
and that better-informed, judicious electors could prevent this from
happening. In other words, the Electoral College is supposed to act as a
check on the citizenry, should it be hoodwinked by a demagogue.
View photos
“Scene
at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States,” with George
Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, at the
Constitutional Convention of 1787; oil painting on canvas by Howard
Chandler Christy, 1940. The painting is 20 by 30 feet and hangs in the
United States Capitol building. (Photo: GraphicaArtis/Getty Images)
Founding father Alexander Hamilton articulated this view in the Federalist Papers:
“A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the
general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and
discernment requisite to such complicated investigations. It was also
peculiarly desirable to afford as little opportunity as possible to
tumult and disorder.”
The
Electoral College was also created as a result of compromises with
smaller states, to ensure that they would not be overlooked. Each state
has the same number of electoral votes as it has congressional
representatives. Voters in smaller states thus have more influence than
those in larger states, because every state, no matter how small, has
two U.S. senators.
But
some historians point to slavery as another driving factor in the
formation of the Electoral College. Southerners were worried that direct
democracy — one person, one vote (in actuality, one white, male
landowner, one vote) — would give Northern states greater sway in
political affairs. But if the South had been allowed to include its
slave population in determining the numbers of representatives and
electors, it would have greater political power. This resulted in the
infamous Three-Fifths Compromise, in which slaves were counted as
three-fifths of a person.
The
writer Joyce Carol Oates and others have argued that this system will
always benefit rural, more conservative voices at the expense of urban,
more liberal ones.
The
Change.org petition is part of a growing trend of petitions prompted by
Trump’s election. Many are directed explicitly at the president-elect
and urge him to rethink his policy positions or behavior on the campaign
trail. A voter in Virginia is calling for Trump to meet with SpaceX CEO
Elon Musk to learn about the reality of climate change. A Californian mother of two children with chronic illnesses is urging Trump to protect the commitment enshrined in the Obamacare legislation that forbids discrimination based on pre-existing conditions. Another woman in California is asking for Trump to condemn hate crimes that his supporters commit in his name.
But
these petitions for Trump to re-examine specific policies or actions
have not yet resonated with the public as strongly as the petition to
the Electoral College calling upon its members to stop Trump from
entering the Oval Office. Many supporters have been promoting the
Change.org petition on social media.
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