Reading the thread on whether Hillary Clinton ran a bad election and a thread on running for vice-president as an independent I looked up how many faithless electors there were in 2016. There were 10 total but what is interesting is that 8* were Clinton electors and only 2 for Trump. Why is this interesting is that in 2016 the campaign for faithless (Hamiltonian) electors was to deny Trump the presidency but it impacted Clinton a lot more.
So what does this say for the 2016 election, Clinton as a candidate vs Trump as a candidate and the Democrat vs. Republican Parties?
*I am counting 3 faithless electors that had their vote invalidated.
These were basically the Bernie Bro / Jill Stein groupies who voted against Clinton and the Democratic party to spite them and to pour a bottle of rubbing alcohol into Hillary’s and the Democratic party’s already stinging defeat. I have no doubt that had Hillary Clinton barely won the election with 278 or 272 electoral votes, some of these electors would have given Trump the victory, or come close to it. The fringe left is every bit as bat-shit insane as the fringe right, just for different reasons.
There really ought to be a bipartisan movement to end the faithless elector because one of these days, it’s going to have really bad consequences and overturn an election that voters assumed was decided on election night. The originally conceived notion that the faithless elector could serve as a safety mechanism against democratic error was disproved once and for all this past December, when electors knowingly cast their vote for a serial groper who has the mind of a petulant child, hasn’t paid income taxes in two decades, and is currently being investigated by a former Bureau chief for financial crimes. It wasn’t like we couldn’t have known whom we were voting for either.