A teenager from Washington state has become the seventh person to indicate that she will break ranks with party affiliation and become a “faithless elector” in an attempt to prevent Donald Trump being formally enshrined as president-elect when the electoral college meets on 19 December.



Levi Guerra, 19, from Vancouver, Washington, is set to announce that she is joining the ranks of the so-called “Hamilton electors” at a press conference at the state capitol in Olympia on Wednesday.

The renegade group believes it is the responsibility of the 538 electors who make up the electoral college to show moral courage in preventing demagogues and other threats to the nation from gaining the keys to the White House, as the founding fathers intended.

“I stand behind Hamilton electors,” Guerra said in a statement to the Guardian. “I promised those who elected me that I would do everything I could to keep Donald Trump out of office.”

Guerra is one of 12 electors in Washington state who on 19 December have been mandated to vote for Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate, as part of the electoral college. Within the arcane structures of American democracy, the election of the president is not direct by all the people, but passes indirectly through the electors who are in turn expected to vote for the candidate that won their state.

Clinton took Washington state by 53% to Trump’s 37%. Instead of following the electoral college norm of voting for Clinton, Guerra will cast what is in effect a protest vote directed at Trump – she will write in an “alternative Republican” of a more moderate political stripe than the president-elect as a way of highlighting her deep fears about his presidency in the hope of encouraging Republican electors in red states to follow suit.

“I’m only 19 and this is my first time being involved in politics, but I hope that my willingness to put my country before my party will show that my generation cares about all Americans,” Guerra said.

Guerra becomes the third electoral college member in Washington state to come out and proclaim they will break ranks with Clinton as part of a protest directed squarely at Trump. In addition, there are four electors from Colorado who have similarly pledged to vote against the Democratic grain as a statement that they see Trump as unfit for the nation’s highest office.

Should these seven electors go through with their pledge to vote against their state’s winning candidate when the electoral college convenes on 19 December, it would mark an outpouring of political disgust at the future president that is virtually unparalleled in electoral college history. The last time more than one elector broke ranks was in 1912, and only then because the Republican vice-presidential candidate, James Sherman, died before the vote was held.

The most recent presidential election in which a single faithless elector cropped up was 2004. Here, too, there were special circumstances as a Democratic elector from Minnesota appeared mistakenly to vote for John Edwards for both presidential and vice-presidential roles (John Kerry was the presidential candidate).

The paradox of this year’s protest is that the seven faithless electors all plan to vote against Hillary Clinton, coming as they all do from blue states, despite the fact that the target of their ire is Trump. So far, the closest that any elector from a red state has come to defecting is Art Sisneros from Texas, who announced his resignation as a member of the electoral college on grounds that he is not prepared to cast his vote for the Republican nominee.

Sisneros, an industrial salesman from Houston, 40, told the Guardian that in his opinion, and according to his religious faith, Trump was not fit to be president. “He is not someone who would rule justly or wisely. His track record shows that he is a man of coveting and self-serving – a liar and a cheat should not hold that position.”

He said that he had paid a high price for his decision. Though other electors in Texas had been supportive, seeing his stance as serious and considered, he has received numerous threats against himself and his family.

“I’ve shrugged the threats off as people working out their emotion – I think it will blow over,” he said.

Under the electoral college system, US presidents are not chosen directly by individual citizens but are voted into office by the 538 electoral college electors who are selected by each state. That explains why Clinton is currently 2,307,149 votes ahead of Trump on the popular vote, but lost the election by 306 to 232 electoral college votes (pending the outcome of 19 December).

In modern convention, the electoral college system has been read to mean that the electors vote as one block within each state on a winner-takes-all basis according to which presidential candidate won the popular vote within that state, (apart from Maine and Nebraska which split the vote partly by Congressional district).

But this year’s protesters disagree. Sisneros said that he studied deeply the history of the electoral college and had concluded that the system allowed for each elector to bring their own moral compass to bear on deciding how to vote. “Electors weren’t intended to be pledged or bound to any one candidate, they have their own conscience.”

The seven Hamilton electors take a similar view, that the way the system was conceived by the founding fathers was to allow for the moral intervention by electoral college members precisely as a way of dealing with the kind of existential threat posed by a Trump figure. They cite the statement by Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers: “The process of the Electoral College affords a moral certainty, that the office of the President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.”

Bret Chiafalo, 37, from Washington state was cofounder of the Hamilton electors. He told the Guardian that the “founding fathers made it very clear that electors should not elect an unfit president. That’s what I and the other Hamilton electors are trying to do – to work out what ‘unfit’ means and to educate our fellow electors of both main parties about that.”

Along with Guerra and Robert Satiacum, who has also indicated that he intends not to vote for Clinton, Chiafalo faces a $1,000 fine from Washington state for not following party ranks in the electoral college vote. He said he was considering bringing a lawsuit in federal court to challenge the fine, following the argument that any attempt to prevent electors voting according to their conscience was unconstitutional.

Chiafalo predicted that the rebellion could go much further than the seven who are currently on board. He said that by his reckoning there were between 50 and 100 electors across the country weighing up whether to vote their own way as a protest against Trump, though he conceded that his estimate was not backed by hard evidence.

• This article was amended on 1 December 2016 to correct the number of votes by which Clinton is ahead of Trump in the popular vote.