There may be no more powerful indicator of a desire to return to normalcy than the incessant bickering of political factions over electoral structures and processes. Over the past week, Colorado took a prominent place in one of those skirmishes.
On Wednesday, the Colorado Attorney General spent an hour arguing that presidential electors must be bound to cast votes for the nominee picked by the people of their state. The case developed after Colorado’s Secretary of State removed Micheal Baca, an elector pledged to Hillary Clinton (who beat Donald Trump by nearly five percentage points in 2016, 48.2% to 43.3%), who tried to cast a ballot for John Kasich, a primary opponent and vocal critic of Trump.
Baca, selected as an elector by attendees of Colorado’s Democratic Party State Convention months before the general election, surely would have preferred Clinton to either Trump or Kasich. But faced by the post-election prospect of a Trump presidency, he made a Quixotic attempt to persuade enough fellow presidential electors – particularly those from the Republican Party – to join him his “anyone but Trump” cause.
In a portent of the Republican Party’s direction, he managed to get only two pledged Republican electors to join his cause.
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