On Monday, at least eight electors signaled they were likely to select Ohio Gov. John Kasich as an alternative to Donald Trump. | Getty Lessig, lawyers to offer support to anti-Trump electors

A prominent Harvard University law professor is teaming with a California-based law firm to offer legal support for any members of the Electoral College seeking to oppose President-elect Donald Trump in violation of state law.

Larry Lessig says his new effort, which he calls “The Electors Trust,” will provide free counsel to electors, provided by the midsize firm, Durie Tangri, whose partner Mark Lemley is a longtime associate of Lessig’s.


More significantly, Lessig said, the Trust will offer a platform – with guaranteed anonymity – for electors to strategize about stopping Trump from taking the White House. It’s a platform, he said, that could help electors coordinate to determine whether they’ve gathered enough support to stop Trump from winning the presidency.

“It makes no sense to be elector number five who comes out against Trump. But it might make sense to be elector 38,” Lessig said in a phone interview.

Lessig’s announcement, shared with POLITICO on the eve of the launch, comes as the first Republican member of the Electoral College has publicly declared his opposition to Trump. The elector, Chris Suprun of Texas, published an op-ed in The New York Times to announce his intentions to vote against Trump when the 538 members of the Electoral College cast the official vote for president on Dec. 19.

The announcement has buoyed a team of at least eight Democratic electors – based in Colorado and Washington – that has been working to lobby their Republican counterparts to reject Trump and instead support an alternative Republican candidate. On Monday, those electors signaled they were likely to select Ohio Gov. John Kasich as that alternative – and Suprun, in his op-ed, expressed the same preference.

The Democrats leading the effort, who have dubbed themselves “Hamilton Electors,” have argued that the emergence of the first committed Republican elector to reject Trump would embolden others to break from the Republican nominee. Their goal is to convince at least 36 other Republicans to oppose Trump, the minimum they need to block Trump’s election and send it to the House of Representatives.

On Dec. 19, Electoral College members will meet in their respective state capitals and cast the only constitutionally valid vote for president. Trump won the popular vote in states that include 306 electoral votes, and if all of them support him, well above the 270-vote threshold. That’s why anti-Trump electors are working to persuade 37 Republican electors to oppose Trump.

To bolster their effort, a team of lawyers backing the Hamilton Electors are preparing a wave of legal challenges intended to overturn laws in 29 states that purport to bind electors to their party’s nominee. But many constitutional scholars believe those laws – which have never been tested or enforced – run counter to the Founders’ conception of the Electoral College as a deliberative body.