Electors are being harassed, threatened in bid to stop Trump
The bullying is overwhelming Sharon Geise’s tech devices, but not her resolve to support Trump.
The Mesa, Arizona, grandmother woke up Wednesday morning to more than 1,500 emails demanding she not carry out her legal duty to vote for the president-elect
Her answer: mass delete.
“They just keep coming and coming,” Geise told The Post, estimating
she’s received more than 50,000 emails since the election. “They’re
overpowering my iPad.”
Despite the avalanche, she said, her decision to back Trump is stronger than ever.
“Obviously their minds are made up and they’re not going to change. I’m not either,” the soft-spoken Geise said.
Reports of GOP electors being badgered have been reported in numerous states, including Georgia, Idaho, Tennessee, Arizona, Utah and Michigan.
Like Geise, Republican Patricia Allen of Tennessee told The Post she’s been bombarded with 2,000 emails, 120 letters and five phone calls all urging her to switch and vote against Trump. But Allen, 74, said that despite the “siege,” she’s not budging.
“This has never happened before … Do you know how long it takes to delete all those emails every day?” she asked.
She’s also been solicited by a Harvard University group backed by constitutional law Prof. Lawrence Lessig, who has offered free legal aid to electors who change their vote.
“That borders on bribery,” said Allen. “Carried to this extreme, the day might come when an elector could be sold to the highest bidder.”
Lessig claims that 20 GOP electors are considering voting against Trump.
Even if true, that wouldn’t be enough to alter the outcome when the 538 members of the Electoral College gather to cast their official votes. Trump has 306 electoral votes, 36 more than the minimum required.
For Michael Banerian, a senior at Oakland University in Michigan and a Republican elector, the harassment comes with a dark side.
He said he’s been getting death threats via email, snail mail, Twitter and Facebook.
“Somebody threatened to put a bullet in the back of my mouth,” Banerian, 22, told The Post on Wednesday.
In Utah, a group called Democracy and Progress PAC placed full-page ads in Salt Lake City’s daily newspapers telling electors they are “not bound” to vote for trump, who won the state.
But the Desert News reported that under Utah law, Trump must receive all the state’s Electoral College votes, since he won the election in the state.
The paper said Utah’s six Republican electors are being inundated with emails pressing them not to support Trump.
One of them, Salt Lake County Councilman Richard Snelgrove, said there’s no way he’ll cave in to the pressure.
“No, Trump won the Electoral College fair and square,” he said.
The effort to deny the electoral vote to Trump was launched shortly after the Nov. 8 election.
The Clinton campaign came out in support of the effort Monday, backing an open letter from 10 Democratic electors to National Intelligence Director James Clapper calling for an intelligence briefing on what role Russian hackers may have played in the election.
No comments:
Post a Comment