I don’t think it’s likely, but it’s not impossible.
The way that the electors work is this (as I understand it): the state parties each select their slate of Electoral College delegates. So, for Pennsylvania, for example, which has 20 electoral votes, the Pennsylvania Democratic Party picks 20 electors, and the Pennsylvania Republican Party picks a different set of 20 electors. Depending on which candidate wins the popular vote in Pennsylvania, either the Democratic electors, or the Republican electors, are the ones who make the actual votes.
Particularly in a hotly contested election, the parties very likely choose their electors carefully for loyalty to their party (and, thus, loyalty to voting for their party’s candidate), but a rogue could certainly slip through, have a sudden (and major) change of heart, or even potentially be bribed or blackmailed into becoming faithless.
Okay I’ve been crunching some numbers in Arizona. Their website is NOT an easy one to navigate or read. According to their (terrible) dashboard there are 296,694 ballots left to count (although Maricopa is a 200,000 estimate).
Biden currently holds a 46,667 lead.
That means Trump needs to win 58% of the remaining votes to overtake.
Keep in mind, the remaining vote totals don’t include about 9000 military/overseas ballots and several thousand provisional ballots. No matter how the current count ends up, the margin will be small enough that these become important.
The provisional ballots will skew Biden, but who knows about military.
That’s the thing that many people–even Americans–don’t understand.
Legally speaking, Trump HASN’T lost until the Electors vote. Period. End of discussion. Those 538 votes are the only ones out of tens of millions that actually matter.
Hey you are very welcome. I wasn’t feeling any animosity or anything negative toward you at all. I just believe in these extreme circumstances it’s important that things are finely parsed. Not so many internet hangouts are equipped to do that.
But we are so it’s good to spread real info around.
Cheers!
PS: this stuff is being (or is about to be) diced and sliced to the sub-atomic level. It’s very hard to keep up. For me especially. I’m not even a lawyer nor do I dabble in legal punditry. I was only stating my interpretation of info I read.
I’m curious about these. Does anyone know the number of military ballots likely to be cast in Georgia? And has anybody got any idea how they will vote?
I have to say, that seems like a poorly designed system. Like, if we assume everyone is going to be honest and non-partisan it would be okay but if one sneaky bastard can topple the whole thing… yeesh.
Yeah, that’s broken right there. That’s a system that has survived entirely in spite of itself. I had no idea American democracy was that fragile.
There were 8,899 absentee ballots from military and overseas voters that hadn’t yet been returned to election offices in Georgia as of Thursday morning, according to the secretary of state’s office. Another 17,529 overseas ballots had already been returned and counted.
The mistake I made was that it was the SCOTUS ruling that dealt a fatal blow to the faithless elector argument. It isn’t, although that ruling is characterized as having that effect.
It was just clarified by Jeremy Bash on MSNBC that for Pennsylvania to try and go the faithless elector route violates federal law under Statute 3 USC 1, because this statute prohibits retroactively changing the rules. If you’re going to allow faithless electors, it must be specified before the election. To do so also violates Pennsylvania state law and the Constitution. Since Mr. Bash is an attorney, served as Chief of Staff to the CIA and the DOD in the Obama administration, I take him at his word.
And again, I do not believe this election is going to be the 270-268 finish some seem to think it will. It’s already out of reach for Trump. The next big tranches of ballot returns in Nevada, Georgia and Pennsylvania will skew very heavily for Biden due to their counties of origin.
The last ballots that would have helped Trump in Pennsylvania didn’t even help Trump. The counts ate into his lead. These were ballots coming in from Trump-favored counties – and Biden was beating him.
All that’s left in PA are strong Democratic counties that have been going 76% for Biden. There are 175,000 outstanding votes that remain to be counted – more than enough outstanding votes to swamp Trump’s lead as soon as they are added in.
Earlier today I heard a Nevada election official who was positively gleeful about how the ballots were coming in in Clark County. He wouldn’t quite say it, but he made it clear they were strongly favoring Biden – enough to give Biden the win.
I do not believe it is going to be a very close election, but I understand some may feel otherwise. I think the faithless elector attempt is a moon shot by Trump and his remaining supporters, so my preference would be to wait until this election is called.
I am very confident Biden will take PA and NV. AZ and GA would be mere icing on the cake.
Actually, I don’t have confidence the provisional ballots will skew Biden. Many of those could be people voting in the wrong precinct, and election-day voters have been heavily Trump.
For military, a poll this summer had veterans supporting Trump by 10 points, and active-duty personnel slightly supporting Biden by 4 points. But we all know how accurate polls are…