‘A little anti-climactic’: NC electors meet Monday to cast the votes that really count
Despite a last-ditch effort to change the outcome of the presidential election, North Carolina’s 15 electors meet Monday to cast their votes with little fanfare and less drama.
They’ll dutifully cast ballots for President Donald Trump, contributing to his expected total of 232 electoral votes, short of the 270 he needs to win. Democrat Joe Biden will have 306.
“Assuming he doesn’t receive 270 electoral votes, it’s a little anti-climactic,” said Dan Barry, a Union County Republican and one of the state’s 15 electors. “But at the same time it’s part of our constitutional process.”
Electors will be obligated to vote for the president.
Barry is among 538 electoral college members who will meet across the country on the constitutionally mandated first Monday after the second Wednesday in December. He and the other N.C. electors will meet at noon in the state Capitol to officially cast the state’s electoral votes for Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.
Late Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a move by the Texas attorney general, a Republican, to invalidate the electoral votes of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Their 62 total votes would be enough to flip the election to Trump. The president himself joined the case as well as 17 states with GOP attorneys general.
A total of 126 of the 196 House Republicans signed a letter in support of the challenge. GOP Reps. Dan Bishop of Charlotte and Richard Hudson of Concord were among at least seven members from North Carolina.
Trump has tried to personally intervene with GOP officials in three states that voted for Biden.
But nobody is contesting the results in North Carolina, a state the president won by more than 74,000 votes.
Muted pageantry
Monday’s vote will make accommodations for the COVID-19 pandemic. Each elector will get a temperature check and be socially distanced. Parts of the program, such as the National Anthem and Pledge of Allegiance, will be prerecorded. Guests will be limited.
Electors will be sworn in by state Supreme Court Chief Justice Cheri Beasley, who conceded to Republican Paul Newby on Saturday in the state’s last contested election.
Most electors were chosen at congressional district GOP conventions. (Democrats also had a slate of electors if Biden had won the state.) They’ll vote separately for the president and vice president. Then they’ll sign six “certificates of ascertainment” for the record. Two copies will go to the National Archives.
In 1968, the state drew national attention when Lloyd Bailey, a physician from Rocky Mount, broke ranks with fellow Republicans and voted for George Wallace rather than Richard Nixon. That prompted the General Assembly to make such defections illegal. Now North Carolina is one of two states in which an elector can be fined ($500) and their vote nullified if they don’t vote for the candidate to whom they’re committed.
Until 1988, N.C. electors met quietly in the Capitol, signed their official votes and went home. This year, even with the limitations of the pandemic, Monday’s election will involve more pageantry than those earlier meetings.
That’s largely because of a former Cary teacher named Linda Gunter, who has had an almost obsessive interest in the arcane process since college.
“I just really got intrigued by the whole thing,” she said this week.
Gunter has co-authored a 104-page book on the history of the state’s electors. A Democrat, she even drives a car with a license tag, “ELECTOR.” This year she was an elector for Biden.
In 1988, Gunter helped plan more elaborate gatherings of electors as vice chair of Wake County’s Constitutional bicentennial committee. As a senator in the early 1990s, she sponsored a bill putting the ceremony under the direction of the Secretary of State and adding two alternate electors.
Still needed?
Despite a history that dates to the Founding Fathers, Gunter doesn’t believe many Americans know how the system works. And Barry had to tell his mother that she wasn’t voting directly for the president when she voted this fall.
“I had to explain to my mother that you’re electing a slate of electors,” he said.
Critics say the Electoral College is a relic of the past. Two of the last three presidents — George W. Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016 — won in the college despite losing the popular vote.
The critics say the Electoral College also gives undue weight to a relative handful of “swing” states. According to National Popular Vote, just 12 states got 96% of the visits by presidential and vice presidential candidates this year. High on the list: North Carolina with 25 visits. Only Pennsylvania and Florida had more.
The group’s National Popular Vote Interstate Compact would guarantee that electoral votes go to the winner of the popular vote. It’s been approved by 15 states and the District of Columbia, jurisdictions with 196 electoral votes. It needs states with a total of 88 more electoral votes to sign off to go into effect.
Even Gunter believes it’s time for the electoral college to go.
“It really should be abolished,” she said. “Why not just count the ballots?”
This story was originally published December 10, 2020 at 12:37 PM.
