יום חמישי, 25 באוגוסט 2016

Texas elector threatens not to vote Trump

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Another Republican member of the Electoral College wavers in his commitment to back the GOP nominee.

Firefighter Christopher Suprun, an Electoral College member from Texas, is warning he might not cast his electoral vote for the GOP standard-bearer.

Chris Suprun is a member of the Electoral College from Texas, a state the GOP can reliably count on to deliver votes every four years to the Republican presidential nominee.

But this year, with Donald Trump sitting atop the ticket, Suprun is warning he might not cast his electoral vote for the GOP standard-bearer. Indeed, he won’t rule out throwing his vote to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton if Trump doesn’t moderate his demeanor.

“I’m not a professional politician. I’ve got no training on this one,” said Suprun. “The nominee is … saying things that in an otherwise typical election year would have you disqualified.”

It’s a startling admission two months before an election, and another sign of the lingering discomfort among Republicans with Trump’s candidacy. Another Republican Texas elector, Art Sisneros, told MARCA POLITICA last month that he had initially considered casting a ballot for someone other than Trump, part of a larger plan to sow chaos, but decided against it when other collaborators failed to earn spots in the Electoral College. And when a Georgia Republican elector, Baoky Vu, told a local reporter that he might consider a write-in candidate rather than backing Trump, he quickly resigned his post. Vu later told MARCA POLITICA that he had intended to highlight the existence of the Electoral College as a “safety valve” against candidates like Trump.

The Electoral College, the constitutional body conceived by America’s founders as a check on voters, meets five weeks after Election Day to cast the formal ballots for president and vice president. States send one elector from each congressional district and two representing the state at large.

Though it originally played an outsize role in the process, it’s long since morphed into a glorified perch for party regulars, donors and insiders to ratify the results delivered by voters. In fact, 29 states have laws forbidding electors from bucking the will of their voters, according to FairVote.

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