An Open Letter to the Electoral College

©2016 by John LaTorre

Permission to reprint this in any form is hereby granted, provided that the author and source be given due credit.

To be specific, this is an open letter to those members of the Electoral College who are pledged to vote for the Republican candidate. Please hear me out, because I’m going to ask you to do something that few have ever done before, and I need to give you my reasons for it. Please read this with an open mind.

I’m an ordinary citizen, not a politician or journalist, but I have something on my mind that is certainly on your minds, as well, and it’s my hope that my thoughts may help to guide yours.

It’s no secret that this recent election is unprecedented in modern history. And your place in modern history is also unprecedented. As the Electoral College, you’ve always had power that, for the most part, you’ve never seen the need to exercise. But you need to exercise it now, because your actions could influence the future of the country far more than any Electoral College has in the span of American history.

The Founding Fathers, as you know, realized that most elections are straightforward and don’t require anything more than your conveying the votes of your constituents to the Senate, so that they can be counted. And that’s the way it’s been since your College began. But they also realized that there would be circumstances where an election would be so out of the ordinary that some sort of moderating influence would be necessary to ensure the stability of the country.

This is, I believe, such a circumstance. I believe this for three reasons.

First, it seems that the Democratic candidate has won the popular vote by a considerable margin. If this had been any other election, we would have the usual discussion about whether or not the Electoral College should be disbanded in favor of a popular vote. But this has not been any other election. We now know that the voting process appears to have been tampered with in several of the swing states, with no attempt so far to reconcile the results of electronic voting and paper ballots, and that “Gerrymandering” has been taken to extremes in several other areas. All this may be legal, but that doesn’t make it fair or just. And the Electoral College has a unique ability to restore justice and fairness where it is lacking.

Second, the Republican candidate was elected to office on the basis of several sweeping promises, and we now hear that he is breaking those promises even before you cast your votes. This is not the man your constituents thought they were voting for.  This is a man who would say anything to get elected, without any guiding principle except for what directly benefits him or his family. He has already demonstrated a desire to blur the lines of public service and private emolument, to treat a free press as an adversary rather than a critical part of the American political process, and to hold contempt those who would suffer most from a resurgence of violence against those with less power … black people, gay people, handicapped people, women, Muslims, and any number of others. He is filling his cabinet post with billionaires with no experience in the fields they are expected to be conversant with, and whose personal interests run counter to the positions they are expected to fill. And he is already boasting of taking revenge – his word, not mine – on those members of your party who did not support him.

You know all this. You have seen it, as plain as day. And you know that putting the Presidency in the hands of a man like this cannot be beneficial to the political process to which you and your party have dedicated their lives and careers to.

Third, a fair election depends on an informed electorate. That has not been the case in this election, because the media have failed to provide them with fair, unbiased reporting. Instead, we have a candidate that was given a vast amount of free publicity (over a billion dollars’ worth, by some estimates) simply for saying outrageous things. The media have seldom fact-checked the statements of the candidates, resulting in an environment where the electorate was forced to rely on two separate and inimical streams of public information, purveyed by online sources that filtered out anything that ran counter to their own political agendas, both on the left and right sides of the spectrum. This was most egregious in the Republican candidate’s campaign, where he made claims that were proven to be unsubstantiated or simply contrary to known facts, while the media sat silently by without calling him out on it. How could the voting public be expected to make an intelligent decision under these circumstances?

To make matters worse, I read in the morning newspaper that foreign powers have flooded the social media with posts that were designed to hamper the Democratic candidate and favor the Republican candidate, in an attempt to influence the election. We should all be appalled at this attempt by a foreign government to sway our electoral process.

That’s why the Founding Fathers created the Electoral College. To be sure, part of its purpose was to ensure that those living in states with smaller populations had a disproportionate influence on the outcome of elections. But that’s not the issue I’m addressing here. The other purpose was to act as a sort of safety apparatus, much like the fire hose behind a glass panel that you see in some public buildings, under a sign that says “In Case of Emergency, Break Glass.” It’s put there with the expectation that nobody has to use it, like the powers of the Electoral College to disregard a constituent population’s vote. So far, we haven’t needed to use it. But we can, and we should recognize that there are times when we should, and that this may be one of those times.

Which brings us to the second purpose of the College: to allow people with more experience in the political process, with cooler heads than the general population, and the wisdom gathered from years of watching the political scene and how government really works, to use that wisdom and experience to shape the course that they think best for the country, even though that course may go against the wishes of the electorate. Our Founding Fathers could not have foreseen the type of cyber-attacks and electronic vote tampering that this last election has produced, but they knew how demagogues could sway opinions and carry votes, and how necessary it was to provide an opportunity for cooler heads to prevail.

It won’t be easy for you to defy your party’s wishes. For many of you, it would be political suicide, at least for a while. You were appointed as an Elector on the premise that you wouldn’t go against the popular vote in your area, and you would have to break that promise. The fact that you have the power to do this legally won’t be much help here. You will incur disfavor. Even worse, many of you may receive death threats, from that small contingent of the people who voted for your candidate and who trade in the coin of violence and coercion. (And, as you have seen in the past few weeks, you have seen how emboldened these people have become to spend that coin, to an extent that is unprecedented in modern American history.) I’m sure the Founding Fathers foresaw this, too, and trusted that an Electoral College would have the courage and moral fiber to do the right thing, regardless of the consequences. When they began this country, they pledged their lives, their liberty, and their sacred honor to that cause, regardless of the consequences. And they were confident that future generations would produce people with a similar commitment to honor, and that they could put that responsibility into capable hands … into your hands.

I do not envy you. I wish you didn’t have to make this decision. To be honest, being a hero isn’t easy. Most true heroes didn’t want the job. James Meredith and Ruby Bridges didn’t want to be heroes. They just wanted to go to school. The men and women that rushed to help the victims of September 11, 2001 didn’t want that disaster to happen. They would much rather have lived their usual lives instead of battling fires and breathing air laced with asbestos. When John Kennedy was asked how he became a World War II hero, he famously answered, “It was involuntary. They sank my boat.” But when they were called, they answered, regardless of the consequences. That’s what made them heroes. You have that opportunity to be a hero now.

As you know, if you’ve studied American history, Andrew Johnson’s impeachment trial resulted in an acquittal by a single vote. What you may not know is that a number of Republican senators defied their party and voted for acquittal. As a result, none of these senators were elected to office again. Many of them had turned down bribes from the party, in the form of office appointments or diplomatic positions, which had been offered if they switched their votes. So they suffered considerable damage to their careers. But in time, they were recognized and honored as heroes. People came to respect their courage and integrity.  If you likewise defy your party and vote for the common good, I believe that people will in time respect you as well. And your grandchildren will be able to say that their grandparents saved the country from its closest brush yet to political chaos.

So your choice is clear. You can play it safe, do what is expected, retire to your homes and lives as though nothing had happened, and slip into history’s dustbin. Or you can vote your conscience, accept the consequences, and join the Founding Fathers as true patriots. It won’t be an easy decision. But our Founding Fathers counted on you to make the right one. And we are counting on you to make the right one, too.