After the stunning results of the election on November 8, I was slowly coming to terms with Donald Trump as President of the United States and trying to figure out how best to resist the tide.  But things kept happening.  First, there was news of the Jill Stein recount and the remote possibility that Hillary Clinton could win three more states and thus the election.  Then, there are the so-called Hamilton Electors.  Finally we have the CIA confirming that Russian operatives interfered in the election to make Trump President.

I can understand the Stein recount; I can’t understand why Trump is so opposed.  I thought he was alleging massive voter fraud, especially in Pennsylvania one of the states being recounted so maybe this fraud will be uncovered.  I don’t have a lot of hope that all three states, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania will flip, but even one would eat at his margin in the Electoral College.

Which brings us to the Hamilton Electors.  I heard someone talking about them and had to look up what/who they were.  According to Matthew Rozsa in Salon

With just days to go until the real election of 2016 — the Electoral College — the rogue faction known as the Hamilton Electors is making one last-ditch effort to save America from Donald Trump by denying him the 270 votes he’ll need to be officially named president.

But can the Hamilton Electors convince enough of their fellows in the Electoral College to view Gov. John Kasich of Ohio as our era’s George Washington?

Their leaders, who named their group after Federalist Paper No. 68, say it’s still possible that they’ll succeed.

These so-called Hamilton Electors are, interestingly, led by Democrats.

Remember way back before the Democratic National Convention when the chair of the party was Debbie Wasserman Schultz?  Remember that she was removed after her email showing that she was a Clinton partisan and not neutral as a party chair should have been was leaked.  In a long article in Esquire published in October, Thomas Rid wrote

According to Reuters, the FBI first contacted the DNC in the fall of 2015, obliquely warning the Democrats to examine their network. It wasn’t until May, however, that the DNC asked for help from a cybersecurity company called CrowdStrike, which had experience identifying digital espionage operations by nation-states. CrowdStrike immediately discovered two sophisticated groups of spies that were stealing documents from the Democrats by the thousands.

CrowdStrike was soon able to reconstruct the hacks and identify the hackers. One of the groups, known to the firm as Cozy Bear, had been rummaging around the DNC since the previous summer. The other, known as Fancy Bear, had broken in not long before Putin’s appearance at the St. Petersburg forum. Surprisingly, given that security researchers had long suspected that both groups were directed by the Russian government, each of the attackers seemed unaware of what the other was doing.

Vladimir Putin

So while Trump and his advisors may be right in saying they have no reason to believe the CIA, the group that told us Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, a lot of people have known for a long time that Russia was hacking the DNC.  Plus it is now suspected that the Republicans were also hacked but the results never leaked.

Will the revelation of the Russian interference make more electors consider becoming Hamilton electors?  Would this be a good thing?  My long-time friend, Garrett Epps, doesn’t think so.  In his recent column for the Atlantic, he writes

As far as I am concerned, a system in which electors pretend to support one candidate and then go shopping their votes after the fact is dangerous. If you doubt that, consider the frank admission by former Republican vice-presidential nominee Bob Dole that, had the 1976 election been slightly closer, his party was “shopping—not shopping, excuse me. Looking around for electors … We needed to pick up three or four after Ohio.” Turning the post-election pre-vote period into a bidding war would be the one thing most calculated to make the electoral-vote system more of a disaster than it is.

On the other hand, there’s also nothing wrong with saying that on December 19, the electors chosen in November will be responsible for choosing the next president.  Not the voters of their states, not the leaders of their parties.

They themselves. Their individual votes will determine the result.

And each of them must make his or her own choice.

The electors for New Hampshire for example who are all Democrats and all voting for Clinton, have asked for an intelligence briefing before they vote.  Would an intelligence briefing for electors change some Republican minds?  (If you are a Democrat, you really don’t want to be voting for John Kasich, do you?)  I don’t know.  Maybe.

So, as Garrett urges, think about what you would do if you were an elector.

Imagine you were an elector. Imagine you had promised to support a candidate whose platform was American greatness. And imagine before your vote—the vote that would count for history, the vote that could never be recounted or taken back—you received evidence suggesting that the candidate was unfit for the office that he seeks?

And imagine that he wouldn’t do anything to dispel suspicion or refute the evidence.

Don’t look at the popular-vote tracker. Don’t look at the “Founding Fathers.” This is a new problem, and the only place to look is your own conscience.

This is a real crisis for American Democracy:  One candidate won the popular vote by almost three million votes; the other got to the magic 270 in the Electoral College.  Should enough electors decide that in good conscience they can’t vote for Donald Trump because of foreign interference in the election in addition to a growing realization that perhaps he is unfit for the office, what happens next?

Photograph of Putin:  Getty