Well, the Pennsylvania electoral voters all seem to have their heads firmly lodged up their asses.
One elector, Ash Khare, said he and each of the 19 others have been assigned a plainclothes state police trooper for protection.
“I’m a big boy,” said Khare, an India-born engineer and a longtime Republican from Warren County, who estimates he receives 3,000 to 5,000 emails, letters, and phone calls a day from as far away as France, Germany, and Australia. “But this is stupid. Nobody is standing up and telling these people, ‘Enough, knock it off.’ ”
[…]
“I take my job as an elector very seriously, and in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump won,” said Mary Barket, a Northampton County resident and president of the Pennsylvania Federation of Republican Women. “So any argument thereafter, especially about the nature of him being a president, is not going to have an effect on me.”
Barket said she has been inundated with phone calls and emails and letters over the last month. Some tell her to read the Federalist Papers or express fear over Trump becoming the country’s commander-in-chief.
But she said she generally doesn’t open the messages.
“I don’t have the time, first of all,” she said. “Second of all, there’s really not much to be said that’s going to do anything to change my mind.”
[…]
In interviews last week, a number of electors said there was no chance anyone will defect.
“There is zero chance of that,” said elector Lawrence Tabas, a Philadelphia lawyer and general counsel for the state GOP. “If you want to place a bet on that in Vegas, you can make enough money to retire.”
[…]
Khare said he understood that the country is deeply divided and that emotions are running high, but said he was clear on where he stands.
“I will not change my mind,” he said.
Richard Stewart, a Cumberland County resident and the state Republican Party’s assistant treasurer, said he has received probably more than 60,000 emails and hundreds of letters about his role as an elector.
He described the people contacting him and other electors as “sincere but ill-informed and uneducated with respect to the process.”
He has not engaged.
“If Hillary Clinton had won, I certainly wouldn’t be calling up her electors saying change your mind,” he said. “I know how the system works. They lost. They ought to get over that.”
Gee, thanks ever, Pennsylvania.
Via Post Gazette.
Is it not interesting how all republicans telling everyone with a brain to accept that “they have lost” have forgotten Trumps overt and covert calls for armed insurgence in case he had won the popular vote but lost the electoral college (which he probably expected)?
Don’t have time. No effect. Uneducated, misinformed.
And yet as Charly says they’d have done the same, if not worse. See: North Carolina.
All of those remarks are typical of GOP members. ” I am proudly ignorant of the principals I claim to hold dear, so shut-up I am not listening to reason.” Can we take Independence Hall away from them? They clearly don’t value any of the things it symbolizes.
Gee, thanks ever, Pennsylvania.
Yeah, you’re welcome.
Stupid right-wingers talk about insurgency like they’re such badasses. Don’t they realize they bleed the same color as everyone else? They’d be the first to whine “oppression” -- and they will -- when the shit comes down.
What I like about this whole electors business is that no matter how noble the reasons to vote against the state result, it all boils down either to changing the rules mid-play (to let the one who the most popular votes win, rather than how the system works at the moment) or simply overriding the entire democratic process and appointing a ruler regardless of how the election goes. But if the electors do vote as expected then democracy would still be in the dumpster because it gives absolute power to a person and a party who are admittedly and demonstrably anti-democratic (i.e. the NC example by rq #2, and pretty much every single time the GOP held the house while the Dems held the White House).
Damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
And yes, I do know that the electors can technically choose appoint whoever they wish. This only makes the situation sadder/funnier (pick one based on one’s current state of mental breakdown).