Will electors revolt?

Protests planned at state Capitol as presidential election is made official

Monday will either be one for the history books or — more likely — the last gasp of the so-called “Never Trump” movement.

A normally perfunctory exercise, the Electoral College meets in state capitals across the country Monday to cast its votes for president and vice president. But a group called the Hamilton Electors has made this year’s gatherings anything but normal.

Citing Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist 68 essay as their Constitutional justification, the group is trying to convince enough Republican electors to vote against President-elect Donald Trump that it would deny him the 270 electoral votes needed to become president.

The movement has sparked lawsuits in Colorado and elsewhere, and anti-Trump protests are planned at all 50 state capitols. Colorado’s protest is scheduled from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. The state’s delegates are scheduled to vote at noon at the state Capitol in Denver.

The odds of success seem vanishingly small. The Associated Press reported last week that it had interviewed more than 330 of the 538 electors and found little appetite — even among Demo-

— for an Electoral College revolt.

And it’s not Democrats that the movement needs: it’s 37 Republicans from the 30 states in which Trump won the popular vote. That makes Colorado’s rogue Democratic electors irrelevant, aside from the symbolic value of solidarity with their Republican counterparts.

Even if enough Republican electors broke ranks to force a deadlock, there would still be no guarantee of success. Under the Constitution, the Republicancontrolled House of Representatives would then choose the president from the top three Electoral College vote-getters, and could simply reinstate Trump as the victor.

So it’s a longshot, to say the least — the movement’s own leaders acknowledge as much. But even as detractors say they’re conspiring to undermine the will of the people, they describe their revolt as a moral imperative.

“I fear that (Trump) will compromise our values and compromise our future,” said former state lawmaker Polly Baca, one of two Colorado Democratic electors who sued the state to be allowed to vote their conscience. “I feel it’s our moral responsibility to do whatever we can to stop him from becoming president. As electors, we have that responsibility and that ability to stop him.”

So far the group has one Republican on record. But organizers say they have as many as 20 anonymous GOP electors considering voting against their party’s nominee — something the Republican Party itself disputes.

Backers insist the founding fathers intended for electors to be able to vote as they please.

“The idea is that the electors are a fire wall between a direct popular vote (and the presidency),” said Richard Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota, and the former chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush.

“If you’re just there to rubber stamp it, they wouldn’t have done it (created the Electoral College),” Painter said in a conference call last week with reporters. “That wouldn’t make any sense to do it that way.”

Some constitutional scholars agree — but in practice, the effort has been rife with complications.

In Colorado and 29 other states, state law binds electors to vote with the will of the people. That led Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams to adopt a policy allowing an elector to be replaced if they didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton.

A Denver District Court upheld the policy last week, and affirmed criminal penalties for anyone who violates it. Baca and another elector, Robert Nemanich, appealed to the state Supreme Court, which on Friday announced it would not hear the case.

In a separate case in federal court, U.S. District Judge Wiley Daniel denied a request for a preliminary injunction to nullify that same state law, saying that allowing electors to vote against the will of the people “would undermine the electoral process.” That ruling is under appeal.

But even if the laws didn’t apply, many electors reject the idea of forcing an Electoral College deadlock in this manner. Three- or fourway Electoral College splits have sent the presidential election to the House of Representatives in the past — the last time was in 1824. But it’s never happened in an election like this, in which one candidate secured enough states to win an Electoral College victory outright.

There is precedent for a so-called “faithless” elector that votes against their state’s residents, but it doesn’t happen often. No elector has crossed party lines since 1972, when a Republican elector cast a ballot for the Libertarian ticket, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The Hamilton Electors have endorsed Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who was the last Republican to drop out of this year’s presidential primary.

But the national protest movement Monday wants to see Clinton elected, citing her 2.9-million edge in votes in the popular vote.

The movement’s backers are seeking to downplay the involvement of Democrats, even as Colorado’s Democratic electors have become a national focus because of their legal actions.

“If it’s perceived as colluding with the Democrats, it’s going to be very hard for Republicans to deal with that,” Painter said. “The backlash would be extreme.”

The backlash would be extreme either way. What the electors are trying to do — deny an Electoral College victory to a presidentelect who won 30 states — is unprecedented.

And, exceedingly unlikely.