The petition "Electoral College: Make Hillary Clinton President on December 19" is online at Change.org. It has won 2,010,778 signatures, of the 3 million it seeks.

On December 19, the Electors of the Electoral College will cast their ballots. If they all vote the way their states voted, Donald Trump will win. However, they can vote for Hillary Clinton if they choose. Even in states where that is not allowed, their vote would still be counted, they would simply pay a small fine - which we can be sure Clinton supporters will be glad to pay!

We are calling on the Electors to ignore their states' votes and cast their ballots for Secretary Clinton...

24 states bind electors. If electors vote against their party, they usually pay a fine. And people get mad. But they can vote however they want and there is no legal means to stop them in most states.

Sign it. It can't hurt. And if nothing else, we can undermine Trump's credibility from jump street. Exactly as the right undermined Obama—except for legitimate reasons.

Politico reported Aug. 25 that members of the Electoral College from Texas were threatening not to vote Trump. Quoted was Chris Suprun, who said he won't rule out throwing his vote to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton if Trump didn't moderate. "I'm not a professional politician. I've got no training on this one. The nominee is...saying things that in an otherwise typical election year would have you disqualified."

From KUTV in Salt Lake City:

University of Utah finds legal case to impeach Donald Trump
Researchers at the University of Utah said on Monday Nov. 7, there's a strong case to impeach Donald Trump, should he be elected as president.

Law professor Christopher Peterson said he found ample evidence to charge the Republican candidate with fraud and racketeering, both of which are considered felonies within state and federal law.

In his analysis “Trump University and Presidential Impeachment,” Peterson looked at Trump University, where students spent close to $30,000 to learn about practicing real estate...

The school closed in 2010 but still faces numerous lawsuits that could cast a shadow over his presidency, Peterson said.

"In the United States, it is illegal for businesses to use false statements to convince consumers to purchase their services," explained Peterson. "The evidence indicates that Trump University used a systemic pattern of fraudulent representations to trick thousands of families into investing in a program that can be argued was a sham. Fraud and racketeering are serious crimes that legally rise to the level of impeachable acts."

Peterson also said Congress can push for an impeachment in civil cases — the president doesn't need to be criminally convicted — and that it can consider crimes committed before the candidate was elected to office.

The Green Papers explored the question in a commentary after the 2000 elections, entitled "May Electors Defect?" Ironically, it finds that under the framers' "original intent," electors were supposed to be "free agents"—but that case law is ambiguois and divided on the question. Time for the conservatives to swallow some of their own  "original intent" medicine?

Yes, this is the longest of longshots. I nonetheless consider it to be tactically critical. The odds of it actually working are vanishingly slim (although not quite zero, as it is technically legal and things are just topsy-turvy enough). But it positions us well on the propaganda front: denying his presidency legitmiacy from jump street—just as the Republicans effectively did with Obama, only with us it is for VALID REASONS.

From McClatchy: 

Voter suppression laws likely tipped the scales for Trump, civil rights groups say Civil rights groups say a tangle of Republican-backed "voter suppression" laws enacted since 2010 probably helped tip the scale for Republican nominee Donald Trump in some closely contested states on election night.

"When we look back, we will find that voter suppression figured prominently in the story surrounding the 2016 presidential election," said Kristen Clarke, the president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

Fourteen states had restrictive new voting laws on the books for the first time in a presidential election this year, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law: Alabama, Arizona, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin.

The laws included a mix of photo ID requirements for voters, cuts to early voting opportunities and curbs on voter registration activity.

The Electoral College must rise to the occassion and correct this fatal mistake of Trump's victory—before we abolish the Electoral College itself and overturn the voter suppression laws, to assure that this never happens again.

An encouraging account on International Business Times is entitled: "Can Hillary Clinton Still Win? Electoral College To Vote In December After Candidate Wins Popular Vote."  It notes the petition online at Change.org, which ia already above 3 million signatures.

The idea is enthusiastically plugged on Huffington Post, under the title "The Electoral College Was Designed to Prevent Trump. You Can Make This Happen." States wrtier Douglas Anthony Cooper:

Trump can still be stopped. The Founding Fathers foresaw just this catastrophe, and built a fail-safe into the Constitution. It’s called the Electoral College. Alexander Hamilton was explicit: this mechanism was designed to ensure that "the office of president will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications." In short, it was designed to prevent just this situation: the rise of an unqualified demagogue like Donald Trump.

Daily News Bin also runs a piece promoting the idea. Politico back in August reported that: "Even red-state Republicans in the Electoral College are uncomfortable with the man they’ll have to support." We must urgently appeal to their conscience.

NBC reported in 2007 that Maryland was actually drawing up a plan to free electors to give their votes for president to the winner of the national popular vote. This idea is not as radical as it wounds.

See also the page on the 2016 elections on the National Archives' Electoral College website. 

Masha Gessen writes eloquently in New York Review of Books about how the conciliatory talk from Obama and other Democratic leaders now of the need for "good faith" in Trump is is dangerously "treating him as a 'normal' politician" and "close[s] off alternative responses to his minority victory."

Shaun King writes in the Daily News: "No, we should not wait and see what a Trump administration does. We should organize our resistance right now."

Now, I am hearing people say that we should wait and see what a Donald Trump administration actually does before we mobilize our opposition to him. Frankly, that is the dumbest, most aloof, disconnected, privileged thing I've heard the past two years. If you believe we need to wait and see what Donald Trump and his team stand for, it is probably because you feel pretty strongly that you and your loved ones will not be targets of his administration or their policies. With few exceptions, the only people I see encouraging Americans to give Donald Trump a chance before they are outraged are white heterosexuals. Everybody else is panicking.

He concludes: "We can't wait until he does those things before we act against him. We must outsmart and out-organize his team. I implore you to ignore anybody saying anything other than that." We heartily agree, although the question of how to outsmart and out-organize them is a very tricky one...

The idea does seem to be gaining ground. Politico just reported that two Democratic members of the Electoral College have issued a call for their Republican colleagues to refuse to seat Trump. P. Bret Chiafalo of Washington state and Micheal Baca of Colorado are appealing to “Moral Electors,” in an effort to persuade 37 Republicans to dump Trump —just enough to block his election and leave the final decision to the House of Representatives. 

Said Chiafalo: "This is a long shot. It's a Hail Mary. However, I do see situations...when we've already had two or three Republican electors state publicly they didn’t want to vote for Trump. How many of them have real issues with Trump in private?"

Politico reported in October that Virginia elector Erich Reimer broached dumping Trump after the pussy-grabbing revelations. He said: "If the Electoral College were free to be a more deliberative body, his troubling character would be a prime and disqualifying concern in considering who to vote for."

A Huffington Post commentary points out that the electoral college was designed in part "to prevent a person unfit to govern from attaining office," as snopes.com puts it.

The National Archives page on the Electoral College informs us: "If no candidate receives a majority of Electoral votes, the House of Representatives elects the President from the 3 Presidential candidates who received the most Electoral votes."

Now, the idea of it going to the House is not comforting. But even the worst Republican nimrod they could pick—say, Pence—would lack both Trump's charismatic appeal and dictatorial ambitions.

Thus asks Eric Zorn in the Chicago Tribune. 

The Founders were wary of demagogues and created a political system of checks and balances to weaken the chance that one would take power. That system has survived centuries of domestic and foreign tumult and the occasional election of buffoons and rascals as commander in chief, despite Alexander Hamilton's reassurance in Federalist No. 68 that all presidents would naturally be "preeminent for ability and virtue."

But our republic has never been tested as it will be when Donald Trump is sworn into office. He lacks not only ability and virtue, but he also lacks a fundamental respect for the Constitution (aside from the Second Amendment), he lacks an understanding of the fine points of domestic and foreign policy and he lacks the cool temperament necessary to guide the most important nation on Earth through perilous times.

He fans the flames of tribalism and nationalism, inspiring and comforting those with deplorable views. He purchased the support of a majority of American voters with a set of brazenly false, often contradictory promises. He praised and made common cause with brutal Russian dictator Vladimir Putin while actively undermining domestic confidence in our electoral system.

Yeah, yeah. But why, then, do you write "when Donald Trump is sworn into office," Eric? This is the moment for urgent pressure on the Republican electors not to seat him.

Paul Abrams has a commentary on HuffPo, "Not Over Yet: Russian Involvement Confirmed, Electoral College Should Deny Trump The Presidency." He quotes Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers boasting of the safeguard against chaos provided by the Electoral College:

[T]he immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation... It was also peculiarly desirable to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder. This evil was not least to be dreaded in the election...to...so important an agency...as the President of the United States. But the precautions which have been so happily concerted in the system under consideration, promise an effectual security against this mischief.

While saying that we "should not recommend lightly" that the electors act against the will of their voters, Abrams himself concludes:

Add all this up: a sociopath, who lost the popular vote (that he himself said should be determinative), admitted Russian involvement in the election, and complete opacity about what Trump’s financial relationships are with that meddling foreign power nor with his role model who leads it, Vladimir Putin.

Together, these constitute an appropriate basis for the Electoral College to perform its role as the "sober second-thought" the Founders envisioned.

This election is not over.

In another good sign that the idea is gaining currency, CBS runs a commentary entitled: "Amid Electoral College debate, will some electors go rogue?" It deliciously recalls that Trump himself denounced the Electoral College as a "disaster for democracy" four years ago, but today hails it as "actually genius," now that its machinery has made him president-elect! Let's hold him at his word from four years ago that the popular vote should be respected!

A group called Hamilton Electors has been launched to promote the idea. It also quotes Hamilton from the Federalist Papers: "The process of [the Electoral College] affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications."

Fuckin' A, Alexander.

Wikipedia happily provides a "List of United States presidential electors, 2016." Can they be pressured—legally, respectfully and politely?

Hillary Clinton's lead in the popular vote has now widened to a million, making her margin bigger than the winning margins for John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. (The Nation)

National Review is meanwhile prominently featuring screeds in defense of the Electoral College. One imagines they would be dissing it as a tool of the elites if the results had been otherwise. Let's show 'em what that Electoral College is really for, Hamilton-style! Go argue with Alex, National Review!

Finally, the Washington Post notes that Breitbart is resorting to "bizarre math" (basically, dropping California from the totals on the basis that real Americans are in the "heartland," or something) to propagate the lie "that Trump won the REAL popular vote."

Shameless. 

The Arizona Republic reports Nov. 17: "Arizona presidential electors report flood of pleas to reject Donald Trump." 

Arizona's presidential electors have received a torrent of emails and phone calls in recent days pleading with them to choose Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton or any other candidate except President-elect Donald Trump...

Four electors told The Arizona Republic Thursday that over the past week or so, they've been hit with thousands of emails, phone calls and letters sent to their work and homes.

Robert Graham, chairman of the state Republican Party and an elector, said the emails are mostly coming from out of state and appear to be part of a coordinated effort to try to deny Trump the presidency by swaying enough electors to back anyone but him...

"It is total harassment," said Graham, who estimates he has received about 1,700 such emails and letters. "It started about a week ago. Now? Bam. It's hardcore."

Yet several of the e-mails are quoted, and all are very police, appealing to the electors' patriotism and conscience.

Hillary Clinton is being urged by a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers to call for a recount in three swing states won by Donald Trump, New York magazine reports. The group—which includes voting-rights attorney John Bonifaz and J. Alex Halderman, director of the Center for Computer Security and Society—believes they've found persuasive evidence that results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked. The group is so far not speaking on the record about their findings and is focused on lobbying the Clinton team in private.

Yours Truly makes the case in The Villager for urgent pressure on the electors to refuse to seat Donald Trump. The clock is ticking. We have until Dec. 19 to act. And the future of the country — indeed, the world — depends on it.

Green Party candidate Jill Stein has crtainly played a problematic role in the election, even asserting that Clinton was more dangerous than Trump. But now she does seem to be rising to the occassion—launching a campaign for a recount in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. As a candidate, she has standing to demand the recount—so she is effectively fighting Clinton's battle for her. But these states apparently have filing fees of up to a million dollars. An online donation drive has already raised enough for two of these states, and they were working on the third, Michigan. Wisconsin State Journal reports that "State officials are readying for an unprecedented potential recount." CNN has given the effort some coverage.

Might we actually be building up some momentum here?

OK, we are gaining momentum. This is good. From ThinkProgress:

Members of the Electoral College should not make Donald Trump the next president unless he sells his companies and puts the proceeds in a blind trust, according to the top ethics lawyers for the last two presidents.

Richard Painter, Chief Ethics Counsel for George W. Bush, and Norman Eisen, Chief Ethics Counsel for Barack Obama, believe that if Trump continues to retain ownership over his sprawling business interests by the time the electors meet on December 19, they should reject Trump.

In an email to ThinkProgress, Eisen explained that "the founders did not want any foreign payments to the president. Period." This principle is enshrined in Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution, which bars office holders from accepting "any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state."

Perhaps more meaningful in our celebraity-driven culture is that singer Ani DiFranco has also weighed in for the idea. She writes on HuffPo: "President Trump Isn’t A Done Deal. Electors Should Vote For Clinton On Dec. 19."

HuffPo meanwhile has an ironic laugh at Fox News hosts saying it's "disgraceful" that protesters would seek to "delegitimize" the incoming president—when the network took precisely that attitude toward Obama. Even last year, host Sean Hannity said of Obama, "Not my president."

His absurd claims, with no evidence, that he would have won the popular vote if not for "millions of people" voting illegally (NYT, Nov. 27) certainly suggest that. The actual popular vote gap has now surged past 2.2 million—making Trump the least popular victor since John Quincy Adams in 1824. (Inquistr)

Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School and the author of Republic, Lost: Version 2.0, has an opinion piece in the Washington Post: "The Constitution lets the electoral college choose the winner. They should choose Clinton."

Talking Points Memo reports that Texas GOP elector Art Sisneros wrote in a blog post Nov. 26 that he has decided to step down rather than either vote for Trump or become a "faithless elector."

The Guardian reports that seven have now joined the "Hamilton Electors" group that pledges to support an unnamed "alternative" Republican candidate. The problem is, they all seem to be Democrats. The report does not indicate that a single Republican elector is on board.

Christopher Suprun, a Republican elector in Texas (and veteran 9-11 first responder) has an op-ed in the New York Times today, "Why I Will Not Cast My Electoral Vote for Donald Trump." He writes: "I believe electors should unify behind a Republican alternative, an honorable and qualified man or woman such as Gov. John Kasich of Ohio. I pray my fellow electors will do their job and join with me in discovering who that person should be."

Politico reports that the Hamilton Electors group has briefed the Clinton team on their initiative, although they have received no commitment of support.

Historian Robert McElvaine has a piece on HuffPo advocating for the "Compromise of 2016" under the headline: "Hillary Can Be a Hero by Saving America from Trump."

If Hillary Clinton releases all 232 delegates pledged to her and asks them to vote instead for a Republican who lives in the real, factual world, is not a misogynist and thin-skinned bully, does not associate with white nationalists, and has an attention span longer than 140 characters—perhaps John Kasich or Mitt Romney—provided that a minimum of 38 Republican Electors agree to vote for that same candidate, that person would become the President-elect on December 19 and the Republic would be saved from the likely disaster that a Trump presidency would bring.

The Americans for the XII Amendment website has a list of daily actions you can take to help prevent Trump from being seated. But the clock is ticking... We are down to 10 days now.

He writes on Facebook:

So far this weekend, I've received phone calls from three electors who say they have doubts that Donald Trump should be chosen by the Electoral College next week (December 19). They tell me they've been in contact with other electors who feel the same way.

I don't want to get your hopes up about this. Chances are, the Electoral College will still give Trump the 270 votes he needs to become President of the United States. But I find it interesting that several electors are at least raising this question.

In my view, electors have a constitutional duty not to vote for Donald Trump. The framers of the Constitution established the Electoral College to guard against two possibilities: either that a demagogue might be elected, or that a foreign power might influence the outcome of a presidential election. Trump epitomizes both of these concerns.

What do you think?

]The above-cited Harvard law professor Larry Lessig is reported to have said that 20 Republican elector are considering flipping to vote against Trump—more than half the 38 needed to bar him from taking office. "Obviously, whether an elector ultimately votes his or her conscience will depend in part upon whether there are enough doing the same. We now believe there are more than half the number needed to change the result seriously considering making that vote," Lessig told Politico.

Some 30 electors (all Democrats) have signed on to an open letter demand for an intelligence briefing over Russian meddling in the election before they cast their votes. These include supporters includes New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner, as well as members California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Maryland, Oregon, Washington and Virginia. (Daily News)

The top two Republicans in Congress—Sen. Mitch McConnell and House speaker Paul D. Ryan—now support investigations into possible Russian meddling in the election. (NYT)

I think it's a pretty reasonable demand that Trump not be seated while this investigation is pending. AskTheElectors website has collected nearly 200,000 citizen letters to the electors urging them to follow their consciences and dump Trump. See also their Letter to Electors.

Robert Reich's Quote of the Week:

"The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity .…They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."

Vice President Henry A. Wallace, April 9, 1944.

The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a call by Colorado Democratic electors Polly Baca and Robert Nemanich' to immediately halt the enforcement of state law requiring them to cast their votes for Hillary Clitnon, concluding the electors failed to lodge a compelling constitutional argument. But they agreed one probably exists—and pointed to a potential legal argument that could work. In their ruling, the judges said any attempt by Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams to remove electors "after voting has begun" would be "unlikely in light of the text of the Twelfth Amendment." (Politico, Dec. 17)

The vote is in, and only six electors nationwide went "faithless." Texas electors cast 36 votes for Trump, one for Kasich (the above-mentioned Chris Suprun), and one for Ron Paul. Another Texas elector, named as Art Sisneros, chose to resign rather than vote for Trump.  Ironically, more Democratic electors dumped Hillary. In Washington state, four of the 12 electors refused to vote for Clinton in a moral appeal to their Republican counterparts. Instead, they cast votes for Colin Powell and Faith Spotted Eagle, a Native American tribal leader who has led opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline. (Texas Tribune, The HIll, Dallas News, NYT)

Not that it matters anymore, but one more particularly relevant Hamilton quote in defense of the Electoral College. From Federalist Papers No. 68:

Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption. These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one querter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?

We are on a 32-day countdown to the inauguration. Now what?

Big ups to Barbara Lee, Sheila Jackson Lee, Raul Grijalva and a handful of House Democrats for raising objections. But—as predicted—not one Senator would provide the needed signature to hold up the certification. Big ups also to three protesters from the group Democracy Spring who disrupted the proceedings and were forcibly removed from the chamber. Shame, shame, shame on Joe Biden for shutting everyone up and admonishing that "It's over." (Morning Consult, ABC, Jan. 6)

Writing in Jurist, Roy Ulrich of UC Berkeley issued "A Progressive Call for a Constitutional Convention," elminating the Electoral College and instating direct popular election of presidents. As tempting as the idea is (and it is very tempting), I fear opening the proverbial floodgates. This could be exploited by our enemies to basically repeal the Bill of Rights (except the Second Amendment, natch). The Koch Brothers are currently bankrolling a right-wing push for a con-con...

It is uncharted territory from a constitutional standpoint, but no less a personage than Robert Reich is calling for that in Newsweek. 

The Constitution does not specifically provide for annulment of an unconstitutional presidency. But read as a whole, the Constitution leads to the logical conclusion that annulment is the appropriate remedy for one.

After all, the Supreme Court declares legislation that doesn’t comport with the Constitution null and void, as if it had never been passed.

It would logically follow that the Court could declare all legislation and executive actions of a presidency unauthorized by the Constitution to be null and void, as if Trump had never been elected.

Of course this is contingent on the results of the Mueller investigation.

Well, here we are, almost four years later and facing the very good possibility of another electoral debacle, and we get this very dangerous unanimous decision from the Supremes. From Jurist, July 7:

The US Supreme Court unanimously upheld states’ "faithless elector" laws on Monday, which either penalize or remove presidential electors who do not vote for the candidate they pledged to support. The court decided both challenges to “faithless elector” laws on the same grounds.

Currently, 32 states and the District of Columbia have “faithless elector” laws. The pair of cases before the Supreme Court came from Washington and Colorado. The Washington challenge to the laws arose in 2016 when three electors failed to vote for Hillary Clinton after she won the popular vote. They instead wrote in former Secretary of State Colin Powell in hopes of spurring Donald Trump voters to join them.