#TheFirstMonday Movement: How to stop Trump right now [Greg Laden's Blog]

Secretary Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. The way the current Electoral College works, Trump won the Electoral Vote.

However, from the point of view of Federal Law, he didn’t win anything yet. The Electors who gather in each state, with each state’s Secretary of State, to vote on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December are not bound by Federal rule to vote for Trump. They could cast their vote for Clinton.

Those organizing protests may want to consider having some of those protests at the Secretary of State’s office, with the idea of having a very large protest on the First Monday after the Second Wednesday in December, at the time of the casting of the electoral votes.

State laws that govern the way voting works require, in various and sundry manners, those electors to vote en masse (in most states) for the winner of that state’s popular vote. But these are state laws, not federal laws. So called “Faithless Electors” who do not do what the state law specifies may be subject to fines or other punishment. But, their vote, the vote that might get them in trouble in their own states, will still be valid votes that will help determine who wins.

If faithless electors vote for third party candidates or other random individuals, and enough do that, and the Electoral College fails to achieve the 270 or higher majority for any one candidate, then the Electoral College’s results are thrown out and the names of the top three Electoral Vote getters are sent to the House of Representatives, who then have the opportunity to pick a candidate.

They would pick Trump, and we would be back to the situation where the person who won the vote, Hillary Clinton, would not be the president elect.

#TheFirstMonday movement calls on the electors in all states to cast their vote for the person who won the national popular vote, Hillary Clinton. Every elector votes independently, though perhaps on pain of punishment from their state.

Twenty-one electors need to do this, given the current Electoral Vote count of 228 – 290.

There are a few possible unfaithful electors in Washington and elsewhere who may vote for a third party, who were otherwise going to vote for Clinton, so in order to avoid that situation making the Electoral College vote irrelevant, more than twenty-one electors must be unfaithful.

I call for the initiation of fund raising, perhaps through “go fund me” pages and such (I am not experienced with this, I hope others will do this) to pay for the legal fees and perhaps to take care of the families of faithless electors who are punished by their states, and for petitions in those states to insist that the legal authorities there do not take legal action against any faithless electors that may emerge.

Here is some interesting commentary on the Electoral College by Lawrence O’Donnell: