Update December 14: 40 Electors have signed the letter.
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Donald Trump should NOT become President of the United States and it is up to Electors to do their job on December 19.
Their job is to select a candidate for president who, as our Founding Fathers envisioned, would be “endowed with the requisite qualifications,” says an open letter from 11 Electors to National Intelligence Director James Clapper, asking for more information on Russia’s hacking of the election.
How this wasn’t a blowout issue during the campaign is beyond me. It was clear that Russians hacked the DNC and released tens of thousands of emails through Wikileaks – clearly to influence the election toward Trump.
“Separate from Mr. Trump’s own denials of Russian involvement in the election, the confirmed communication between Trump’s aides and those associated with the Russian election interference activity raise serious concerns that must be addressed before we cast our votes,” say Electors.
At the time, President Obama brought leaders of the House and Senate together from both parties to issue a joint announcement about the hacking – but Senate leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) refused and threatened to call it partisan politics if they moved ahead! Could that favor have been reciprocated when Trump nominated McConnell’s wife as Transportation Secretary?
Immediately after the election, Russian government officials openly admitted to being in touch with Trump minions throughout the campaign.
The fact that Trump doesn’t acknowledge this as a significant breach of US democracy is another major reason he’s unfit for the highest office in the US.
Now, Trump has chosen the CEO of Exxon as Secretary of State, a man who has obvious close ties to Russia. If it weren’t for trade sanctions against Russia’s invasian of Crimea and Ukraine, they’d be drilling for oil together in the Arctic and Gulf of Mexico in a $500 billion deal. As Secretary of State, don’t be surprised if those sanctions are suddenly lifted.
If this situation doesn’t deserve a bipartisan investigation and hearings, nothing does – except Hillary’s emails … which a Utah Senator vows to continue. And the investigation should be concluded before Electors vote on December 19. That’s won’t happen, and it will be up to Democrats to do the heavy lifting on this to Republican cries of partisanship.
Last week, the Electors Trust formed to provide legal assistance and counseling to Electors who choose to “vote their conscience.” They are also providing a platform for Electors to strategize and determine whether there are enough votes to stop Trump.
Another group providing legal assistance is Hamilton Defenders, ready to defend the decision of Hamilton Electors, who may vote for a “reasonable Republican” instead of Trump. If you want to communicate to Electors, check out MakeDemocracyMatter.org.
“The guy who got 2.8 million fewer votes to begin with, and won because he took three states by less than 1% may have made it over the finish line, with a push from Vladimir Putin,”says The Daily Beast.
What would the Republican reaction be if the shoe was on the other foot?
They would call the election illegitimate and would declare Clinton an illegitimate president. They’d call on Electors to seat Trump, and would accuse Clinton of TREASON as an agent of a foreign government. We’d never hear the end of it!
Trump and Michigan Attorney General sued and successfully halted the recount in Michigan after it was underway. Preliminary results revealed 87 broken voting machines in heavily Democratic Detroit, and ballots tossed as unreadable or rejected in Democratic Flint. “A hand count was revealing the obvious: uncounted ballots were the votes that defeated Mr. Trump.” In the end 75,355 ballots weren’t counted in a state where Trump won by 10,700 votes. 59% of precincts found the number of ballots didn’t match those reported by voting machines, according to Detroit News.
No surprise that the final tallies in Wisconsin showed no change. In Milwaukee County, for example, ballots were recounted by simply putting them through the same machines. They did not put the programming codes in escrow – as required – so there’s no way to know if they were meddled with.
In Pennsylvania, Trump’s lead was cut in half just by counting more votes. Trump also intervened in Pennsylvania and now that recount has been blocked.
Other Election Irregularities
Exit polls on election day put Hillary Clinton ahead in the key states of North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Florida, so either those polls were deeply flawed or the vote count was compromised, according to election integrity experts.
2016 was the first presidential election since the Supreme Court decimated the 1964 Voting Rights Act, allowing states with long records of discrimination to change voting rules without permission from the Justice Department.
Democrats should also have been shouting about this throughout the campaign.
In North Carolina, hundreds of voting places were closed, leaving people waiting on day-long lines to vote in majority black areas. 868 polling places were closed in 8 southern states. In Wisconsin, some 300,000 people didn’t vote because they didn’t have the “proper” state-issued ID, and in many states, hundreds of thousands of voters were purged from the polls under Republicans’ Crosscheck.
14 Republican-majority states had new voting restrictions in place. They curtailed early voting, moved precincts, inaccurately purged voter rolls, and in Ohio, they decided not to activate voting machine audit software – which means the results can’t be verified.
“The NAACP prevailed in the federal courts against voter suppression no less than nine times in recent months. In Texas, we saved 608,470 votes with a decision from the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. In North Carolina, we saved nearly 5% of the electorate when the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled the state legislature had enacted discriminatory voting laws that intentionally targeted and disenfranchised black voters. Another 4,500 voters were prevented from being purged from North Carolina rolls,” states Cornell William Brooks, NAACP President.
Of course, these actions also affected Senate and House races.
Read, The Election was Stolen – Here’s How and While Democrats Chase Russians, Republicans Keep Rigging Elections.
Trump was right about one thing – the election was rigged, but against Hillary, not him. The election was a “culmination of a decade-long Republican effort to disenfranchise voters under the guise of battling voter fraud,” says Rolling Stone.
Meanwhile, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is chugging along. 11 states have signed on with 165 electoral votes and 12 more with 96 votes have passed legislation in one chamber. When states with 270 electoral votes pledge their electors to who wins the popular vote, the Electoral College will be overturned.
You can still sign this petition – asking Electors to vote for Clinton on December 19, who won the popular vote by over 2.5 million votes. It’s got close to 5 million signatures:
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I really hope this turns the tide