Tenn. electors meet, cast votes for Trump
While controversy loomed in other states as Electoral College meetings convened Monday, in Tennessee, the gathering of electors for President Donald Trump went as smoothly as the Nov. 3 election here.
Despite losing the popular vote and electoral votes nationwide, Trump won by a landslide 23 percentage points in Tennessee, prompting a Republican slate of electors to cast the state’s 11 electoral votes for the president.
“That we in this country continue to move from one elected official to another to another to another over generation after generation is the very thing that sets us apart, makes us unique and allows the freedoms that we all have to be protected because of the fact that we choose our elected officials,” Gov. Bill Lee said while addressing the electors. “And today is part of that process.”
Lee, who has so far declined to acknowledge Democrat Joe Biden as president-elect, did not mention the candidates as he gave a brief speech in the House chamber about the historic nature of the moment. After the votes were cast, he stated for the record that they went to Trump.
The governor on Friday said he would not recognize Biden as the next president until after the Electoral College completed its process and after the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on an ongoing legal challenge by Republicans seeking to overturn Biden’s victory — an effort the high court struck down Friday evening.
After the meeting Monday, he doubled down that the country was “still in the midst” of the process of deciding a president, despite courts overwhelmingly ruling there has been no evidence of voter fraud that would have changed the outcome of the election.
“We’ll see where the process, the legal challenges, the Electoral College vote, where it all goes,” Lee told reporters. “I think we’ll see after today where the process is and what challenges exist and don’t exist and where we are in that process.”
Nationwide, Biden is expected to receive 306 electoral votes on Monday, compared to 232 for Trump. In statehouses across the country, 538 electors were scheduled to formally cast their votes for either Biden or Trump based on the popular votes in their states.
The electoral votes will then be counted at a special joint session of Congress on Jan 6. before Biden and Harris are inaugurated Jan. 20.
In Tennessee, it’s a misdemeanor for electors not to cast their vote for their pledged candidate, an offense that would come with a $50 penalty.
There was no concern in the state this election about faithless electors, as each is already an executive committee member of the Tennessee Republican Party and had been appointed to the Electoral College slate by fellow GOP committee members.
Tennessee’s coordinator of elections Mark Goins, who works for Secretary of State Tre Hargett, presided over the meeting. He began by commending poll workers and other election officials around the state.
“I really consider them the heroes, in my book,” Goins said to the electors. “Today, you will conclude the work that they’ve started.”
Tennessee Republican Party chairman Scott Golden said that unlike most years when the party selects a few alternate electors, this year, they decided to be “overprepared” and appoint alternates for every elector, given COVID-19 uncertainty.
None of the alternates were needed. “Right now, everybody’s healthy and here,” Golden said before the meeting.
The electors were decided by the party’s state committee in September. Many of them served as delegates for Trump earlier in the year or had already undergone a vetting process in an attempt to do so.
Hargett closed out the meeting with a call to show “more grace and mercy to those around us.”
“We need to bring civility back,” Hargett said. “We need to bring civil discourse back to this arena. I don’t know why it can’t start with those of us in this room and who are watching today.”
Despite losing the popular vote and electoral votes nationwide, President Donald Trump won by a landslide 23 percentage points in Tennessee.