Dear Electors,

I understand that as I write this letter, as many as six of your fellow electors have vowed to cast their votes against their states’ popular vote for Donald Trump on the 19th and instead with the national popular vote against him. I commend their bravery and commitment to justice and I urge you to follow suit and vote against Trump as well, as is your right as an elector and, I will argue, even your duty.

All partisan politics aside, Trump is unprecedentedly unfit to be President of the United States. There are countless reasons to vote against him, ranging from heretofore unheard of massive conflicts of interest, literally thousands of litigations against him (from fraud to racketeering to sexual assault), troubling connections to organized crime and to white nationalist and white supremacist groups classified as hate groups (and in some cases, domestic terror groups), numerous unconstitutional proposed policies, and numerous examples of behavior unbecoming to the moral codes of a sitting President. I will outline all of these in this letter.

Mr. Trump has over 500 business assets domestically and abroad that present an unprecedented number of huge conflicts of interest for his presidency, including but not limited to:

-Trump International Hotel in Washington D.C., which in addition to presenting the typical conflicts of interest one might expect from a major piece of D.C. real estate being owned and exploited for profit by a president, is also on land owned by and leased from the Federal Government, which is expressly forbidden by the General Services Administration for any elected government official to rent, buy or lease.

-The construction of an office building in Buenos Aires, the building permits of which Trump has already been reported to have been discussed with Argentinian President Mauricio Macri as early as election day.

-Trump Towers Istanbul, owned by Turkish oil and media magnate Aydın Doğan, who has been an outspoken mouthpiece for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose oppressive and doggedly anti-democratic regime has been decried by human rights advocates across the globe. Doğan’s developers have paid Trump $10 million since 2014 to use his name on the towers.

-As many as 8 contracts in Saudi Arabia (a nation known for sheltering, arming and training anti-American terrorists, including the majority of the 9/11 attackers) for the construction of a luxury hotel.

Just to name a few.

Richard Painter, chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush has said of these financial interests: “There are so many diplomatic, political, even national security risks in having the president own a whole bunch of properties all over the world.”

Ken Gross, a former elections enforcement official and lawyer who has advised presidential candidates from both parties, has called Trump’s unprecedentedly large number of conflicts of interest “troubling,” and added “he has investments in businesses in unfriendly countries and the businesses are often tied to those unfriendly governments.”

Elijah Cummings, U.S. Representative for Maryland’s 7th congressional district, has filed a letter to House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, U.S. Representative for Utah’s 3rd Congressional District, formally asking the committee to conduct a review of Trump’s financial arrangements in regards to any conflicts of interest, stating: “We have never had a president like Mr. Trump in terms of his vast financial entanglements and his widespread business interests around the globe.”

Regarding Trump’s refusal to publicly release his taxes (unheard of for any presidential candidate), Representative Cummings said: “Mr. Trump’s unprecedented secrecy and his extensive business dealings in foreign countries raise serious questions about how he intends to avoid conflicts of interest as president.”

Cummings, Gross and Painter, as well as multiple third party experts and analysts, have dismissed Trump’s proposed idea of a blind trust operated by his three adult children, Donald Jr., Ivanka & Eric, as a massively inadequate solution. The fact that they are his own children put aside, which should be an immediately obvious disqualifying condition, it has been widely reported that Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric were all active in his campaign, named by Trump to his transition team’s executive committee, have accompanied him on multiple presidential meetings, and he has even unsuccessfully tried to get them National Security Clearance. It is safe to say they do not in anyway have the impartial distance required to constitute a blind trust. In addition to this, numerous aspects of the publicly visible and accessible nature of real estate holdings versus other financial interests make a blind trust a particularly ineffective means of avoiding conflicts of interest.

Trump is a real estate investor and reality television star with no political experience, has consistently defrauded workers and contractors while building unsustainable businesses that wreck their local economies. The stock market dropped precipitously to record lows the day he was elected.

Trump has had over 4,000 lawsuits filed against him ranging from fraud to racketeering to sexual assault, and as many as 75 of these suits are currently still in litigation, these numbers are vastly unprecedented for any major party Presidential candidate, let alone a President.

As previously stated, Trump is the first Presidential candidate in U.S. history to not release his tax returns and overwhelming evidence suggests that he took full advantage of a tax loophole enabling him to avoid paying taxes for 18 years.

In addition to all of the above, Trump has been openly and officially supported by the leadership of the KKK, The American Nazi Party, white nationalist organization The American Freedom Party, white nationalist organization The National Policy Institute, militiamen from the Oregon Standoff and numerous other militias, militia sympathizers, white nationalist groups, and white supremacist groups that have been classified by the ACLU and the SPLC as hate groups, and in some cases by the FBI as domestic terrorist groups.

Aside from a handful of brief, one-sentence attempts at distancing himself from some of the white nationalist and white supremacist individuals and groups supporting him (which he offered only when pressed by the media) he has made no real significant move to sufficiently condemn and denounce these groups as the hate mongers they are, and, in fact, many of his actions this year have signaled sympathy for these groups.

During the primaries, Trump named William Johnson, head of the white nationalist American Freedom Party (who was quoted as wanting an “separate white ethno state” absent of “ascertainable negro blood”) as one of his California delegates during the primaries, before bad press made him rescind his choice.

On multiple occasions, Trump has incorporated propaganda and false statistics sourced from white nationalist and white supremacist websites into his campaign literature and stump speeches.

Trump’s campaign manager, Steve Bannon, who he also picked as White House chief of staff, is a famously antisemitic white nationalist sympathizer who has compared feminism to cancer and published countless sexist, homophobic, transphobic, antisemitic and Islamophobic articles on his “Alt-Right” website Breitbart.

On top of all of this, White Nationalist Richard Spencer of the National Policy Institute, a man whom Trump’s right hand man Bannon has referred to warmly as a leading “intellectual” of the Alt-Right movement he helped to create, recently celebrated Trump’s victory by shouting “Heil Trump” at a rally in a federal building in DC, to which the crowd responded with Nazi Sieg Heils.

These people are emulating the rhetoric and ideals of The German Nazi Party, literally one of the most repugnant, murderous, authoritarian, anti-Democratic (not to mention virulently anti-American) regimes in human history, a regime that all Americans have been taught since schoolchildren to revile as the epitome of fascism. Yet these are the people with whom our supposed President and his cabinet name as “intellectuals.” That cannot and should not be tolerated.

Trump’s affiliations with these racist, antisemitic, xenophobic, homophobic, sexist groups are too numerous and significant to be ignored. And these groups should surely be considered among the “factions” James Madison warned of in Federalist Paper #10, describing them as “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” One of Madison’s strongest arguments for the existence of an Electoral College in the first place was to safeguard the democratic process against such factions.

One might reason that, despite all of this, as a Republican elector, you may still have deep reservations about voting against your party. To this I would point to the fact that Trump has been denounced by numerous high ranking Republican Party leaders, including former President George H.W. Bush, sitting Arizona Senator John McCain, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former RNC Chair and Lieutenant Governor of Maryland Michael Steele, former New Hampshire Senator Gordon Humphrey, to name a few. Former President George W. Bush’s White House strategist Karl Rove has called Trump “graceless and divisive,” and “a complete idiot.” He is not only bad for America as a whole, he is bad for his own party.

But if you still need more reasons as to why Trump is unfit to serve as President of the United States, here’s a laundry list of things he has said and done that I hope you would agree would point to how unsuitable he is for the job of upholding the U.S. Constitution and governing the populace in a decent and judicious manner:

-Advocated illegal and unconstitutional “enhanced interrogation” (i.e. torture) methods (“more than waterboarding”) deemed war crimes according not only The Geneva Conventions but our own Constitution (5th & 8th Amendments specifically)

-Proposed unconstitutional immigration policies such as deporting legal U.S. citizens with undocumented parents

-Expressed his desire to solve the crisis of terrorist factions with indiscriminate bombing, a sadistic technique known to embolden our enemies and an affront to the traditionally Conservative principle of non-intervention historically advocated by his own party

-Balked at the notion of nuclear non-proliferation and actually advocated for more nations arming themselves with nuclear weapons

-Suggested a “nuclear first use policy,” referred to as “f-ing dangerous” & “nauseating” by former nuclear launch officer John Noonan

-Advocated murdering civilian family members of military opponents, classified as a war crime by The Geneva Conventions and our own Constitution (5th & 8th Amendments) and proven to embolden terrorist groups and increase terror attacks

-Proposed various anti-Muslim proposals that violate the First Amendment right to Freedom of Religion

-Advocated on behalf of expanding the NSA’s ability to log call records, violating the Fourth Amendment, a proposal decried by legislators on both sides of the aisle

-Praised genocidal tyrant Saddam Hussein, admiring how “tough” he was on the various Iraqi ethnic groups he killed en masse when they tried to revolt against him

-Attempted to set up an investment partnership with dictator Muammar Gaddafi

-Stated the world would be “100%” better if Hussein and Gaddafi were still in power

-Treasonously encouraged Russia to attack the United States by hacking government emails

-Has done business with known mafia bosses Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno and Paul Castellano

-Suggested the assassination of his opponent Hillary Clinton

-Threatened to imprison his opponent Hillary Clinton if elected

-Suggested military invasions without consent of Congress

-Advocated plundering oil from Iraq and Libya in violation of the Geneva Conventions

-Suggested the US not come to the aid of our NATO allies

-Praised dictator and sworn enemy of the U.S., Kim Jong-un

-Hired advisors with close ties to U.S. political opponent to the US Vladimir Putin, whom he has praised as a friend

-Encouraged violence at his rallies

-Threatened violence against his political opponents

-Gave campaign money to family members and personal businesses

-Said that a sitting U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel couldn’t do his job “because of his Mexican heritage”

-Disparaged Senator John McCain’s military Service because he “got caught” by the Viet Cong

-Accused Ted Cruz’s father of assassinating JFK

-Accused President Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton of “founding ISIS”

-Publicly insulted the parents of an American military officer killed in war

-Said, regarding women: “You have to treat them like s — t,” referring to them as “pieces of a — ,” “fat pigs,” and worse.

-Called Mexicans “rapists” and “drug dealers.”

-Said, “laziness is a trait in blacks.”

-Mocked a disabled reporter

-Mocked a disabled actress

-Been caught on tape admitting in vulgar language to sexually assaulting women

-When speaking recently of current military action in Mosul, erroneously stated that the Islamic State’s leadership has fled the territory

-Didn’t know what the term “nuclear triad” was during a Primary debate

-Still didn’t know what the word “Brexit” was less than a month before Brexit

-Referred to a non-existent “Article XII” in the constitution

-Claimed, against global scientific consensus, that Global Warming is a “hoax”

-Said “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, I wouldn’t lose voters”

-Blamed sexual assault in the military on gender integration

-Lied about who has endorsed him

-Slandered Hillary Clinton by falsely accusing her (twice) of “openly laughing at” a rape victim

-Threatened to violate the First Amendment by changing libel laws making it easier to sue media organizations

-Publicly insulted upwards of 300 (and counting) candidates, journalists, organizations, countries, sitting politicians, and celebrities this year alone

The list is absurdly long and filled with egregious transgressions against the Constitution, American Democracy in general, and even common human decency.

As for Trump’s supporters, hate crimes against Muslims alone spiked 89% since Trump won the primaries and there were similarly large spikes in hate crimes against Black, Latino and Gay people. And since Election Day, hate crimes against Muslims and people of color have already exceeded those in the wake of 9/11.

On a personal note, I was informed as I was writing this letter, that an acquaintance of a friend of mine, a black man named William Sims, was recently shot and killed in El Sobrante, California by a white man in what police have called a hate crime. Given the fact that this rash of hate crimes in the past three weeks has been decisively correlated to Trump’s win, I can’t say this tragedy is just a horrible coincidence. This is just one of numerous reports of attacks I’ve seen and heard, not only on the news but from my own community. The other day my wife’s friend was, without the slightest provocation, beaten, dragged by her hair and called a terrorist by a white woman for simply walking down the street wearing a shirt with Farsi writing on it. Many more of my friends, family and acquaintances have been physically attacked and/or verbally abused in the past two weeks alone by Trump supporters emboldened by his win. This is just in within the first three weeks of Trump’s America. It sickens me.

And while, sadly, much of this hatred is not new, what I have been seeing this year and particularly what I am seeing right now, has been truly, terrifyingly new, much bolder and realer than I have seen in the past, a palpable atmosphere of fear. Many of my family and friends literally fear for their lives. These are not the feelings a president elect should engender.

As a person of color with numerous Muslim, Middle Eastern, Latino, gay, black, Jewish and Asian friends and family members, as an American citizen whose family and community is exemplary of the diversity this nation has given much lip service to treasuring but all too often (especially of late) painfully little muscle to defending, and most importantly, as a father of a beautiful two-year-old baby girl, I am deeply concerned for the safety of my family and friends and I am deeply concerned about what kind of country and what kind of world my daughter will grow up in.

None of the above named facts about Mr. Trump to me constitute “the kind of merit as would be necessary to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the WHOLE union” described by Alexander Hamilton as essential to a President’s character in Federalist Paper #68.

You find yourself in a position to remedy a rare situation. There have been only 4 times in American history where a President has taken office without winning the popular vote:

-1824: Congress voted for John Quincy Adams after an inconclusive election in which no candidate received enough votes to win in the Electoral College

-1876: Rutherford B. Hayes, in what has been called the most contested election in U.S. History, originally lost both the popular vote and Electoral College but then won the Electoral College by one vote on a Congressionally mandated recount after multiple assertions of voter suppression and fraud. This was during the Reconstruction after the Civil War, one of the most tumultuous political periods in U.S. history.

-1888: Benjamin Harrison lost the popular vote to incumbent President Grover Cleveland by a mere 90,000 votes (0.8% of the electorate at the time) but won in the Electoral College.

-2000: George W. Bush lost the popular vote by .5% but won in the Electoral College.

If we disregard the first two examples, in which Congress played a decisive factor, and look at only the two cases in which the Electoral College decided the race despite the popular vote, you’ll notice that popular votes were both under 1%.

In this year’s election, Senator Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by estimates ranging from 2 million to 2.5 million votes and counting, anywhere from 1.7% to over 2%, and even in lowest estimates, the most decisive win of the popular vote in somewhere from 140 to 190 years.

While Trump won 290 Electoral College votes, which was 20 votes over the 270 he needed to win the presidency, one must consider his slim 1% win in Wisconsin, his slimmer 0.3% win in Michigan, and his even slimmer 0.2% win in Pennsylvania. The combined Electoral College votes of those three states is 46, more than enough to reverse the results of the election. His victory, which he has described as a “landslide” was in reality around 50,000 votes, which is one of the closest in American history.

Now consider that a Wisconsin vote recount is already underway and that Michigan and Pennsylvania recounts will likely follow. In this light, Trump’s 20 vote win of the Electoral College hardly seems decisive, in fact, quite shaky.

Perhaps even more noteworthy is that in these same three states, both the Center for Computer Security & Society and the National Voting Rights Institute have cited data indicating that a disproportionate number of Trump wins in counties with electronic voting machines versus losses in counties with paper ballots point to the very real possibility of fraud via rigged voting machines and/or other forms of computer hacking.

Given that The United States has already formally accused Russian Intelligence of perpetrating cyber attacks on U.S. Government email servers earlier this year, it would be a grave mistake to take these signs of sabotage lightly.

After closely reviewing and verifying all of these facts, I cannot see how an elector could cast their ballot for Trump in full confidence that he legitimately (or even lawfully) won the hearts and minds of the majority of the people of this country.

Furthermore, nothing in the Constitution compels you to vote against such an overwhelming popular majority. In fact, the concept of “one person, one vote” presented in such high profile Supreme Court cases as Baker v. Carr (1962) and Reynolds v. Simms (1964) as essential to the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment in protecting the individual rights of voters would provide an ample, urgent and very compelling argument as to exactly why you should honor the popular vote by voting against Trump.

There is a historical precedent for Electoral College protest votes against Trump. Throughout the course of American history, 157 electors in the Electoral College have cast votes against their party’s pledged candidate in protest. For example, a number of electors voted faithless against Richard Nixon in both the 1968 and 1972 elections due to doubts of his character and assertions of fraud. They did not end up changing the election results, but they were proven right by history when Nixon resigned in 1974 in the midst of his impeachment proceedings for massive fraud, and they remain an important precedent.

As I’m sure you already know, depending on your state, you may incur a monetary penalty of up to $1,000 for casting a vote outside of your party. There are many people that would be happy to reimburse you for this fine — indeed funds are being raised privately and publicly as we speak and should you incur legal repercussions, and there are lawyers willing protect your rights as an elector pro bono. A meager price to pay for our democracy.

To me, the case against a Trump presidency is abundantly, overwhelmingly, unprecedentedly clear. He is simply unfit to be president. He goes against nearly every last purported American value in the book. He is the exact type of person the Electoral College was created to keep out of the White House.

Alexander Hamilton asked that you, the electors, exercise “a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements… proper to govern [your] choice.” Reason should dictate the absolute necessity of keeping Trump out of office.

The majority of American voters voted against him. We beg that you do too.

To quote your fellow elector Michael Baca from Colorado, who has pledged to vote with the national popular vote: “The Founding Fathers created the Electoral College as the last line of defense.” I couldn’t have said it better.

You have found yourselves endowed with a sacred privilege and I hope that you use it wisely.

Sincerely,

Victor Vazquez