Suprun Could Be The Only Faithless GOP Elector

When his op-ed came out in the New York Times, many hoped that Christopher Suprun would be only one of many Republican electors who wouldn't vote for Trump. Suprun, an elector from Texas who said that he couldn't vote for Trump because he finds him to be dangerously unqualified for the office, is so far the only Republican elector to have said that he will vote for a candidate besides Trump. Art Sisneros, another Republican elector from Texas, resigned from his post because he refused to vote for the president-elect for religious and moral reasons. But despite all the hype, the list of Republican electors who have publicly claimed to be voting for someone else stops there, at least for now.

Curiously, Harvard law professor Larry Lessig claims that there are up to 30 Republican electors who are considering casting their votes for a different Republican. That's actually approaching the number that would need to defect before Trump's electoral vote total would dip under the 270 votes he needs to win. That number is 37, to be exact. Yet even Lessig's vague and unsubstantiated claim still leaves enough ground to make the prospect of anything but a clean Trump victory in the Electoral College highly unlikely.

Suprun named Kasich as a candidate whom he could get behind, and there are a number of Democratic electors who claim that they will also vote for the Ohio governor. Their ploy is a real long shot — they're hoping that enough electors from both sides of the aisle will switch their support to Kasich so that Trump's vote total will dip below 270, at which point the decision would go to the House of Representatives. It would then be up to them to decide between the candidates who received the highest electoral vote totals.

If the "Hamilton Electors," as the group of rogue Democratic electors is calling themselves, were to succeed, the three candidates in question would be Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and John Kasich. Many see Kasich as the candidate most likely to receive the highest amount of bipartisan support, which is why these Democratic electors are choosing to betray their promises to vote for the Democratic nominee. Clinton could never receive the requisite amount of support in a Republican majority Congress, but Kasich might be able to.

However, the whole plan depends on at least 37 of the 306 electors pledged to Trump breaking those pledges — and so far, it hasn't been confirmed that any Republican elector besides Suprun has said that he or she will do that. Trump's opponents can hope for a miracle — but at this point, it looks like that's about the only thing that could stop Trump from stepping into the White House on Jan. 20.