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The scandal that will take down the Electoral College
Roy Neel· Friday, December 16, 2016
The year is 2020. An incumbent Republican president is struggling, with little interest in the job or his reelection campaign. Trailing in the polls, he gets an unexpected boost from a terrorist incident. As the country reels from the catastrophe, the election tightens, ending in a near draw. Determined to reverse the voting results, the President’s hardened advisors concoct an elaborate conspiracy to steal the election by manipulating the Electoral College.
This story, which became my novel, The Electors, was written 18 months before Donald Trump shocked the word on Nov. 8. At the time it seemed little more than a far-fetched political thriller that might delight followers of House of Cards or Homeland, or the recent network hit, Designated Survivor.
Yet truth has become stranger than fiction. The long-ignored Electoral College has become the final dramatic act in our complex system of electing someone to fill the world’s most powerful job. As Trump prepares to take office in six weeks, new revelations about
Vladimir Putin’s alleged cyber-hacking attempts to influence the outcome of the presidential election have caused some electors to question their commitment to Trump when they meet to vote next Monday.
In my novel, the president’s Chief of Staff masterminds a secret program to persuade a few electors to switch their votes to throw the election into the House of Representatives, which would decide the outcome=. In my novel (and in reality) each state would receive one vote. California, with 38 million citizens: one vote. Wyoming, with fewer than 600,000: one vote. I imagined a fiercely divided and partisan Congress doing whatever it took to deny election to the Democratic challenger.
That was fiction—now on to reality.