BOISE, Idaho — All four of Idaho’s Republican electors cast their ballots for President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.
The formal but brief ceremony at the Idaho Statehouse on Monday was limited to mainly Republican Gov. Brad Little, Republican Secretary of State Lawerence Denney and the four electors due to COVID-19 concerns.
Electors are chosen by each party, the Republican electors that served Monday were: Lieutenant Governor Janice McGeachin, State GOP Chair Raul Labrador, Ada County Commissioner-elect Rod Beck, and former state senator Melinda Smyser.
While there is national focus and controversy on how elections were run in other states, no courts have found evidence of widespread voter fraud or tampering. There are still questions being asked nationwide about voting processes in certain states, but Labrador believes Idaho got it right.
“I think they are a model for the rest of the United States. We are confident that it reflects the will of the people of Idaho,” he said.
There aren’t questions about Idaho’s results because of how the state was able to coordinate leading up to the election, according to elector Rob Beck. He believes other states should have done the same.
“It was because the legislature and the Governor worked together to change the election laws a little bit so they could start tabulating all the thousands of absentee ballots prior to the Nov. 3 date and they started about a week before,” Beck said. “The rest of the nation should have done that. The states that didn’t do that, they ought to come out and take a lesson from the State of Idaho on how to conduct an election that’s fair, that’s honest and that gets the job done rapidly.”
Elector Melinda Smyser said it’s an honor for the group of four to represent Idaho, and that Idahoans participating in the process is crucial.
“Get out, get involved in your party. One vote does make a difference, especially in the last election as we saw several close races,” she added.
After a challenging election year that saw Idaho County Clerks and election volunteers take on tough circumstances, Idaho Secretary of State Lawerence Denney, who presided alongside Gov. Little over the electoral votes, is proud of how smoothly things went in the Gem State.
“There was a lot of new stuff and we put it out on the clerks, and they were amazing to get it done as they did,” he said.
While Idaho’s electoral college process was very simple and without controversy, there are Idaho Republicans who continue to ask for investigations into how the election went in other states with questions about invalid votes.
Labrador doesn’t believe the electoral college vote today across the country means it’s necessarily the end of the line.
“I think until inauguration day I think the President and the Vice President should be allowed to do anything that is necessary and is within the legal bounds of the law," he added. "There is a lot of things that can be done and it’s up to their legal team to decide what they are going to do."
Trump garnered 64% of the Gem State's vote in the Nov. 3 presidential election, easily claiming red-state Idaho’s four electoral votes.
Monday is the day set by law for the meeting of the Electoral College. In reality, electors meet in all 50 states and the District of Columbia to cast their ballots. The results will be sent to Washington and tallied in a Jan. 6 joint session of Congress over which Vice President Mike Pence will preside.
The electors' votes have drawn more attention than usual this year because President Donald Trump has refused to concede the election and continued to make baseless allegations of fraud.
Biden is planning to address the nation Monday night, after the electors have voted. Trump, meanwhile, is clinging to his false claims that he won the election, but also undermining Biden’s presidency even before it begins. “No, I worry about the country having an illegitimate president, that’s what I worry about. A president that lost and lost badly,” Trump said in a Fox News interview that was taped Saturday.
Following weeks of Republican legal challenges that were easily dismissed by judges, Trump and Republican allies tried to persuade the Supreme Court last week to set aside 62 electoral votes for Biden in four states, which might have thrown the outcome into doubt.
The justices rejected the effort on Friday.
Biden won 306 electoral votes to 232 votes for Trump. It takes 270 votes to be elected.
In 32 states and the District of Columbia, laws require electors to vote for the popular-vote winner. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld this arrangement in July.
Electors almost always vote for the state winner anyway because they generally are devoted to their political party. There's no reason to expect any defections this year. Among prominent electors are Democrat Stacey Abrams of Georgia and Republican Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota.
The voting is decidedly low tech, by paper ballot. Electors cast one vote each for president and vice president.
The Electoral College was the product of compromise during the drafting of the Constitution between those who favored electing the president by popular vote and those who opposed giving the people the power to choose their leader.
Each state gets a number of electors equal to their total number of seats in Congress: two senators plus however many members the state has in the House of Representatives. Washington, D.C., has three votes, under a constitutional amendment that was ratified in 1961. With the exception of Maine and Nebraska, states award all their Electoral College votes to the winner of the popular vote in their state.
The bargain struck by the nation's founders has produced five elections in which the president did not win the popular vote. Trump was the most recent example in 2016.
Biden topped Trump by more than 7 million votes this year.
And then there’s one more step: inauguration.
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