title: MISLEADING MAINSTREAM MEDIA Is Pushing False Narrative That Trump Electors Could Steal Election From Him …Why It’s Not Gonna Happen…And Why Their Attack On Our Democracy Is A Really BAD Idea
text: Here is Michigan elector Michael Banerian telling about death threats that he s received over his vote for Trump on Monday.The leftist media has encouraged the (insanely impossible) idea that Trump could be defeated by the Electoral College, by using misleading headlines, like the one below from USA Today to help fuel the idea that Trump is not really that popular after all: The New York Times has shamelessly published several articles pushing the narrative that Trump could be ousted on December 19th when the electoral votes are cast for President:The Washington Post has also falsely promoted the idea that there was a real possibility Trump could be defeated on Monday:And finally, only two days ago, NBC News published this embarrassing piece on the possibility of an electoral coup on Monday, clearly written to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Trump s presidency:In a typical election year, the mid-December meeting of the electoral college interests only political junkies and civics teachers.Not this time.As the electors prepare to vote Monday, many say they have been besieged by phone calls and e-mails. One already resigned. Another said he won t vote as his state did. And electors in three states went to court seeking authority to vote as they please.Hillary Clinton s victory in the popular   but not the electoral   vote and uncertainty about Donald Trump have generated unusual interest in an event that is usually a political footnote.Members of the Electoral College will cast their historic votes for the next president of the United States on Monday. In the meantime, they are under siege.The nation s 538 presidential electors have been thrust into the political foreground like never before in American history. In the aftermath of a uniquely polarizing presidential contest, the once-anonymous electors are squarely in the spotlight, targeted by death threats, harassing phone calls and reams of hate mail. One Texas Republican elector said he s been bombarded with more than 200,000 emails. I never can imagine harassing people like this. It s just f  up,  said Jim Rhoades, a Republican elector from Michigan who runs a home inspection service.  I ve lost a bunch of business. In recent decades, the Electoral College had become such a reliable rubber stamp of Election Day results that it was viewed as an afterthought.But with many Democrats desperate to block the all-but-certain ascension of Donald Trump to the White House, this long-neglected body has been gripped by turmoil, and its members have been subjected to pleas to upend centuries of tradition by casting their votes for someone other than the president-elect.There have been ad campaigns targeting electors and op-eds assailing their role. One Democratic member of Congress has called to delay the vote for president while an investigation of Russian involvement in the election is underway. Two others have pleaded with electors to consider Russia s role when deciding how to vote. Progressive groups are preparing protests across the country at sites where electors will meet to cast their ballots. Personal contact information for many electors has been posted publicly   and it s been used to bury them with massive email campaigns.Chris Suprun of Texas, the only GOP elector to publicly oppose Trump, has been especially battered by criticism   mainly from fellow Republicans, including party leaders who have questioned his integrity.Here is Tucker Carlson embarrassing Chris Suprun, as he attempts to explain why he won t vote for Trump: https://youtu.be/7oOhwHG2Gb4Suprun announced his intention to vote for someone other than Trump in a New York Times op-ed, recalling his service on Sept. 11, 2001, as a first responder to the attack on the Pentagon. On Friday, a Texas television station ran a story accusing Suprun of inventing his 9/11 role, the story that Suprun built his career around. The charge, based on a discrepancy with Suprun s LinkedIn page, featured an anonymous former colleague accusing Suprun of  stolen valor.   PoliticoEarlier this year, former deputy White House chief of staff Roy Neel published a whimsical piece of political fiction about  faithless electors  changing a presidential election outcome. In The Electors, an incumbent Republican president loses the popular vote and falls three electors short in the Electoral College as well. His devilish chief of staff hatches a plot that succeeds in turning two  faithless electors  against the Democratic candidate they were pledged   but not required by law   to support. Because a third turncoat has a massive heart attack before her vote is technically cast, the election goes to the House and the incumbent prevails.I have seen no particular evidence that the shadowy anti-Trump group trying to overturn the 2016 election with Electoral College defections was inspired by Neel s book. But it is so wildly unrealistic and potentially counterproductive that by comparison The Electors is a work of gritty realism.Technically, there are 21 states with 236 electoral votes (135 of them won by Trump) where laws do not require electors to vote for the popular-vote winner in that state. It is also theoretically possible that lawsuits being filed to strike down the coercive laws in the other 29 states (plus the District of Columbia) that sanction  faithless electors  could succeed, though there is no way they could succeed before the Electoral College casts its votes on December 19.The bigger problem is that interest in denying Trump the presidency through a campus riot in the Electoral College is pretty much limited to Democrats.The idea of Republican electors turning against Donald Trump found some traction back in the days when the mogul had nailed down the Republican presidential nomination over the violent objections of much of the GOP. It was the general-election equivalent of all the ultimately vain talk about a revolt of pledged Republican convention delegates determined to keep the demagogue away from the White House. Two Republican electors, one from Georgia and another from Texas, publicly expressed doubts they could bring themselves to cast votes for Trump (two Democratic electors expressed similar reluctance to vote for Hillary Clinton).Two things changed radically to re-consign the  faithless elector  scenario to the pages of fiction. First, of course, Donald Trump did not win the Electoral College vote by the two or three votes that might have made a very small group of renegades potential coup-makers. It would now take a defection of 37 electors to undo the deed of November 8. Beyond that, the Republican Party is no longer in open or even covert revolt against Donald Trump. In a process that began the moment he won the presidential nomination, the GOP has dutifully lined up in support of its president-elect. An awful lot of the anti-Trump sentiment Republicans exhibited earlier this year involved fears that he would lose badly and drag down the Republican-controlled Congress with him. Those fears are obviously moot today. No Republicans in Washington or in the states will offer cover to a faithless elector, much less 37 of them. It is so not happening.And so the plea made most conspicuously by Harvard law professor and political busybody Lawrence Lessig, that Republican electors rear up on their constitutional hind legs and award the presidency to Hillary Clinton as the popular vote winner, does not even pass the laugh test. Other members of the putsch cabal depart from Lessig by promoting a scenario whereby Trump-hating Republicans and Clinton-hating Democrats could join hands to elect somebody else entirely.And even if the moon turned blue and somehow a coup did happen, there is a fail-safe opportunity for Republicans when Congress meets to count and certify the Electoral College vote. Congress could choose to disregard the actions of  faithless electors  (with support from GOP officials in the affected states) and certify Trump as the winner. And if (and we are deep into science fiction at this point) the Electoral College does not clearly award anyone with 270 electoral votes, then the House would name Donald Trump president anyway.  NYmag 