The Only Way For The Electoral College To Stop Donald Trump

I know this will take a few minutes to digest but the stakes are way too high at this point.
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As I wrote a few days ago, the voice of the American people needs to reach the Electoral College members as they possess the Constitutionally permissible capacity to vote against the results from Election Day. To review, each political party chooses Electors for each state but the process of nominating Electors varies across the country. Many Electors are nominated during their political party’s state political convention. Per conventional election practices, an individual votes, those votes are tallied, and typically the candidate who wins the popular vote in an individual state gets the Electors. In many states, the popular-vote winning candidate’s Electoral College representatives are pledged to cast their votes in favor of their state’s winning candidate. However, as I stated earlier this week and as has been echoed repeatedly since Election Day, they are not required to do so. In fact, as written by Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, one of the primary reasons the Electoral College was put in place to block the election of an unfit candidate.

There are 538 electoral votes in all, but a candidate only needs a majority of the votes, the notorious 270, to win the Presidency. Thousands of us may have been approaching the Trump debacle from the wrong perspective in trying to persuade the Electors to vote Hillary Clinton into the White House. For a number of reasons, this is unlikely to happen. We are at the point now where the President-elect continues to demonstrate his lack of fitness, experience, temperament, or basic governmental understanding to become the 45th President of the United States. We need to drop our party affiliations and act in the best interests of the approximately 300 million American citizens potentially put at risk with a narcissistic neophyte Commander-in-Chief.

At this critical point, the ONLY way to stop Trump, as described by Solomon Gandhi, political scientist who trained at the University of California at Berkeley, may be a split Pence/Kaine ticket. I know this will take a few minutes to digest but the stakes are way too high at this point. According to Gandhi, Democratic Electors would be wasting their time and votes if they insist on voting for Clinton. The majority of Republican Electors, despite the fact that they were established to be impartial evaluators, will never vote for Hillary Clinton. It would also be a mistake (if the goal is to prevent Trump from assuming the Oval Office) to go outside of the four people that earned Electors (Clinton, Trump, Pence, and Kaine). One of the only other candidates who approached viability was John Kasich and he did not perform well in the primary season. Conventional wisdom tells us that Hillary Clinton is arguably the most qualified person to run for the Presidency in recent history. However, we lost conventional wisdom four weeks ago. A more realistic compromise that still protects our great nation from Donald Trump may be a split ticket with Mike Pence and Tim Kaine.

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