Why Michael Moore Is Offering Electoral College Voters Money
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Michael Moore recently made a passionate plea to the members of the Electoral College. The filmmaker also included an offer to electors willing to change their votes from Trump - he says he'll pay for their fines.
In certain states that Trump won, there are laws that require electors to vote for the same candidate who won the state. The 538 members of the Electoral College will cast their votes Monday for president, which is the official decision of who won the presidential election, not the popular vote which Trump lost.
By the time of publication, it was still expected that the Republican electors would vote for Trump.
Moore wrote a Facebook post on Sunday asking Republican electoral college voters to honor their "responsibility to protect us from someone unstable" and urging them to vote their "conscience."
He then followed with another Facebook post and multiple tweets offering to pay fines for electors who change their vote away from Trump.
"I don't want to see you punished for doing the right thing," he wrote in the Facebook post. "The majority of Americans made it very clear on November 8th that they didn't want Donald Trump for President. You will only be following the will of the people."
However, Moore's offer to pay the fines of potential Electoral College defectors received bipartisan backlash on Twitter.
There's no federal law requiring electors to vote with the voters of the state, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). However, there are at least 30 states that have laws to try to bind electors to their district or state's popular vote.
"These laws may either impose a fine on an elector who fails to vote according to the statewide or district popular vote, or may disqualify an elector who violates his or her pledge and provide a replacement elector," wrote the NCSL. "No elector has ever been penalized or replaced - nor have these laws been fully vetted by the courts."
