INQUISITR.COM / News & Politics

Faithless Electors Go Against Hillary Clinton, Electoral College On Verge Of Electing Donald Trump

By Aric Mitchell
Published on: 08:12 PST, Dec 19, 2016

“Faithless electors” is a term that has come up a lot in the buildup to Monday’s casting of electoral college votes.

Hillary Clinton supporters feeling disenfranchised by her loss in spite of a popular vote win were staking all their remaining hopes on an effort to turn out more faithless electors for Donald Trump than any previous president.

Hollywood celebrities have released a PSA imploring electors to defect from the president-elect and vote for virtually anyone else. The Inquisitr even previously reported that Trump could suffer from more faithless electors than any other President-elect in history.

Unfortunately for those staking their hopes on such a coup, that doesn’t appear to be happening. In fact, the only faithless electors at this point have been against Hillary Clinton.

LawNewz has been keeping a live feed of results from the electoral college as they come in. As of 3:44 p.m. EST, Trump is just 14 votes away from clinching the Presidency, beating Clinton 256-127.

Perhaps most surprisingly is what happened in Colorado.

One elector has been replaced to give Clinton the nine votes allotted to her when she won that state on Nov. 8.

The faithless electors approach is not having the desired effect, and it is entirely possible that by the time this article is posted, Donald Trump will be your next President of the United States.

One look at the remaining states will tell you everything you need to know.

Three states yet to report — Alaska, Iowa, and Montana — went heavily in Trump’s favor, and that would give him an additional 12 electoral votes, taking his overall total to 268. From there, he would need just two more to defeat the faithless electors movement once and for all.

Making matters worse for anyone hoping for a surprise Hillary Clinton victory, Texas is another state yet to report — a location where there are 38 electoral votes.

That means even if all the electorates from Alaska, Iowa, and Montana, as well as 24 of the 38 in Texas decided to become faithless electors and vote against Trump, he would still clinch the election with the remaining 14 votes from Texas.

Looking at the states who were already unswayed by the plea for faithless electors — Arkansas, Alabama, Arizona, Florida, to name a few — the chances of 24 electors breaking rank in the Lone Star State are close to zero.

Since Nov. 8, there has been a lot of speculation as to what lost the election for Mrs. Clinton. Most recently, Russian hacking has been to blame, and that gave many pushing for faithless electors hope.

In fact, a recent poll conducted by YouGov found that a majority of Americans would be for delaying the electoral college until more evidence was brought to light about what role Russia played in the election.

Additionally, 46 percent of the same sample “told YouGov that they support ‘faithless electors,’ members of the electoral college who plan on voting against the winner of their state,” Mediaite observes.

The hope for a coup of faithless electors have kept Democratic supporters going strong since the end of election night, but with the only defectors now in Mrs. Clinton’s own camp and emboldened support from electors for the President-elect, the country’s turbulent election is close to finalized.

What do you think about the find that Mrs. Clinton has had more faithless electors than Trump? Sound off in the comments section below.

[Featured Image by Michael Kovac/Flickr Creative Commons/Resized and Cropped/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

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