Peter Greathouse, a Republican from Utah, says he’s not “comfortable” with Donald Trump as his party’s nominee. Jane Lynch, a GOP veteran from Arizona, says she’ll likely cast her personal vote for libertarian Gary Johnson or a write-in candidate. Loren Byers, a Texas Republican, calls Trump “a loose cannon.”

Their critiques rank as mild in this polarized election year – until you consider who they are. All three are members of the Electoral College, and if Trump wins their states in November, they’ll be asked to cast the formal ballots that could make him president.


Interviews with Republican members of the Electoral College – all from the red states Trump has his best chance of winning – reveal that the divisions that have wracked the GOP for months have also reached this oft-overlooked body with the ultimate authority to decide the election.

All of the members contacted by POLITICO – including Greathouse, Lynch and Byers – insisted they would cast their electoral vote for Trump if he prevailed in their state. (They’d disenfranchise millions of voters and risk a Constitutional crisis if they didn’t.) But most indicated they would do so through gritted teeth – if only to reject Hillary Clinton or to uphold oaths they took to their party.

“You hold your nose and do some things,” said Jim Skaggs, a Kentucky GOP elector, who said he would cast his electoral vote for Trump but may stay home on Election Day. “Neither one of them give a damn about the voters of Kentucky. They’re here to get elected.”

Several GOP electors refused to say who they’d cast their personal ballot for on Election Day. Others committed to voting for a third party or write-in candidate – if they vote at all – even though they committed to support Trump with their electoral votes.

“I don’t like the fact that I’m going to do this,” said Lynch, the Arizona elector, of committing her electoral vote to Trump. Lynch, who has attended eight national Republican conventions and supported Ronald Reagan over Gerald Ford in 1976, noted that there’s an increasing likelihood that Trump will lose her state to Hillary Clinton, which means a separate set of Democratic electors would be tapped instead.

“Bill Clinton did win Arizona in 1996,” she noted. “So it’s not too far-fetched that Mrs. Clinton might win Arizona.”

Only one GOP elector, Texas’s Art Sisneros, said he’d considered bucking Trump and becoming what’s known as a “faithless” elector.

“I got talked into it by a guy who was trying to find enough faithless electors … just for the sake of causing chaos,” he said. “That was the plan.”

Sisneros said his likeliest subversion would have been to vote Trump’s running mate Mike Pence for president and Trump for vice president – a move that would technically have upheld his pledge to support the ticket. But he said he decided against it because he didn’t like any alternative candidates.

There have been about 157 faithless electors throughout history, according to FairVote. About 30 states have statutes intended to prohibit electors from overturning the will of their states’ voters. Penalties include fines as well as immediate dismissal and replacement.

Oklahoma elector Charlie Potts, a veteran GOP activist, said he hadn’t considered casting his electoral vote for anyone other than Trump regardless of his state’s law – but it’s not because he likes the candidate.

“Trump was pretty close to the bottom, if not the bottom, of my list,” Potts said. “He keeps destroying himself … It’s his demeanor and the things he says that are either one of two things – they’re either stupid, or he says them in such a way that people can interpret them wrong.”

Trump has long viewed the Electoral College skeptically. In 2012 he tweeted that it was a “disaster for democracy.” And he’s spent weeks warning that the 2016 election could be “rigged” against him. Trump associate Roger Stone has begun fomenting a theory that hacked election machines could throw the election and he told POLITICO the Electoral College is on his radar “in the last stages” of the campaign.

Concerns spiked briefly last week when a Georgia Republican elector, Baoky Vu, revealed that he’d consider withholding his electoral vote from Trump even if Trump won his state. Vu resigned quickly and apologized for causing a distraction. He said in a phone interview that he’s glad he forced a discussion on the Electoral College’s role as a “safety valve” against candidates like Trump.

“It seems crystal clear to me that if the founding fathers thought that the majority rules and that’s that, then they would not have created this body called the Electoral College,” he said. “You have to respect their viewpoints on how to sustain a democracy through checks and balances.”

In typical years, seats on the Electoral College are reserved for prominent party insiders and donors, with little drama or fanfare. On the Republican side, the fierce primary between Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz changed the equation.

The 538 Republican members of the Electoral College are picked primarily in the same way as delegates to the national convention: at state conventions and Congressional District caucuses where the most hardcore activists tend to turn out in large numbers. Cruz dominated many of those events and installed supportive slates of delegates across the country. Though he was hoping to influence the outcome of the nomination process, the effort also resulted in dozens of pro-Cruz electors as well.

Electors meet in their state capitals five or six weeks after Election Day to cast pro forma ballots for the winner of their state. This year, Trump’s electors are certain to include a raft of public critics.

“He doesn’t really represent the kind of values that I look for,” said Marty Rhymes, a Texas GOP elector. But Rhymes said spurning Trump would only empower Clinton, who she said has “committed every crime that almost you can mention.” Trump, she said, “is 100 percent better” than Clinton.

Ethan Manning, an Indiana Republican elector, has called Trump “damaging for the Republican brand.”

“I still have those same reservations,” he said in a phone interview. “He was not at the top of my list of candidates to support during the primary. But he is the nominee.”

Byers, the Texas elector, said he’d prefer it if Trump “bowed out” and was replaced by his son Donald Jr. Short of that, he said, he’s hopeful Trump’s aides and Congress would keep a President Trump in check.

“We can look at his advisors and hope Congress can back him up,” Byers said. “I think he’s a bit of a loose cannon, but with the right people around him, he’d do OK.”