Why I Signed That Idiotic Petition Asking The Electoral College To Act Faithlessly

It’s a change.org petition that has 3.6 million signatures and counting. I hope that very few of those signatories imagine change.org petitions to compel anyone to do anything. This one seems particularly unlikely to sway the actions of its targets (the Presidential Electors who will meet next month).

It’s a terrible idea on its face. The people have the right to choose their own government, even if that government is some kind of authoritarian hate regime. The Electoral College, if it survived an Elector reversal, would be forever subject to this new pressure, no matter which losing candidate a reversal would benefit or how unfairly. And yet this seems a unique circumstance.

A hostile foreign government has engineered, to a still emerging and already terrifying degree, the result of an American presidential election. There is one mechanism left to address the fact that this has happened, and there is a vanishingly unlikely but not impossible chance that the electors use that mechanism. I hope that they do.

I’ll quote this from Joe Miller at the APPC:

Alexander Hamilton writes in ‘The Federalist Papers,’ the Constitution is designed to ensure ‘that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.’ The point of the Electoral College is to preserve ‘the sense of the people,’ while at the same time ensuring that a president is chosen ‘by [Electors] most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice.’

By that measure, denying office to Trump is the Electoral College’s exact purpose, a stopgap to be used in the case of a catastrophic breakdown in the ability of the states to choose a President who is fit to serve.

This petition argues that some electors should act against their individual state’s will in order to reflect the nation’s popular vote, and that argument is badly flawed. The election itself is only contested in the swing states and we do not know what the popular vote would look like if every vote mattered, since so many of them don’t. In safely red or blue states, many Americans choose not to vote for president because their opinion on the matter already certainly will or certainly won’t be represented. But because that’s true everywhere except Nebraska and Maine, the result may spread in both directions to roughly equivalent degrees. As the popular vote tally continues to solidify, it seems safer and safer to say that the Electoral College vote does not in this case reflect the will of the people.

But we can’t be sure of that. So, to overturn the result of the election at this stage seems viciously undemocratic, and I cannot disagree with anyone who condemns this petition on those grounds. I hope they’d agree that the Electoral College itself is viciously undemocratic in the first place — by design! — and that this fact comes into sharp relief when the popular and Electoral College tallies disagree by any significant margin. I would hope that the massive Republican uproar following the success of this (pipe dream) plan could lead to the swift redaction of the Electoral College from our founding document. And I wouldn’t blame them if they also immediately removed President Clinton from office. It would seem only fair. The American public’s borderline-consensus choice of “neither of the above” would finally be served.

I am guessing that the majority of people who sign this petition are simply expressing their opinion that Trump shouldn’t become president. They have already expressed that opinion by voting, along with sixty million likeminded others, and it wasn’t enough. The idea of this petition replacing or superseding the vote is idiotic. I don’t like it. I do like that this petition has a chance of alerting the Electors to the fact that their options remain open until December 19th.

Hey, Electors! Our Constitution grants you a vast, strange power. Recognize that direct meddling by the Kremlin has swayed our election and put our country in crisis. Exercise your power. Rescue the United States.