Petition Demanding Electoral College Choose Hillary Clinton Over Donald Trump on December 19 Reaches Almost 5 Million Votes

Will the Electoral College turn out to be Hillary Clinton’s best friend?

The Democratic nominee lost out to Donald Trump in the presidential election despite winning the popular vote. A recent article in the Inquisitr showed how Hillary Clinton’s initial lead of 200,000 votes had increased rapidly after mail-in and absentee ballots were counted in states like New York and California, which have typically been Democratic strongholds. Now rough estimates show Clinton having won the popular vote by almost 2.5 million votes, a substantial lead in what was a closely-fought race.

Hillary Clinton's popular vote lead surpassed 2 million overnight https://t.co/Kj03XW0gVe

— The New York Times (@nytimes) November 23, 2016

In fact, this is only the fourth time in U.S. presidential history that a candidate has won despite losing the popular vote. Most recently, Republican nominee George Bush won the presidency in 2000 even though he lost the popular vote to Al Gore. The Democratic nominee led on that occasion, but an Electoral College lead of five votes meant that Bush became the 43rd president of the United States. The two times before that when a president won the election on the back of the Electoral College was way back in the 19th century, when Rutherford B. Hayes and Benjamin Harrison won the presidency despite losing the popular vote in 1876 and 1888, respectively.

The rarity of such occasions, coupled with a general distrust of the Electoral College (fueled in part by Donald Trump’s rhetoric against it when Barack Obama won the presidency in 2012), has seen Hillary Clinton’s supporters call on the Electoral College to acknowledge her victory in the popular vote and elect her to become the next president of the United States, thereby nullifying Trump’s victory in the presidential election.

A recent online petition demanding that Electoral College choose Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump is close to receiving 5 million signatures, emphasizing the support that Clinton, despite her unpopularity among young voters, still enjoys among major factions within the Democratic Party strongholds.

The petition calls on the representatives of the states where Donald Trump won — 14 in total — to vote for Hillary Clinton when the voting takes place on December 19.

“We are calling on the 149 Electors in those states to ignore their states’ votes and cast their ballots for Secretary Clinton. Why?

“Mr. Trump is unfit to serve. His scapegoating of so many Americans, and his impulsiveness, bullying, lying, admitted history of sexual assault, and utter lack of experience make him a danger to the Republic.

“Secretary Clinton WON THE POPULAR VOTE and should be President.”

While unlikely, the petition has brought to light the popular distrust of a Trump administration. It is a thought which has been gaining momentum over the last few days, with legal luminaries and security experts arguing that an overturning of the result by Electoral College will wholly be within the framework of the United States Constitution.

In fact, Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School, argued in a recent Washington Post column that if the Electoral College did not overturn the result by electing Hillary Clinton to the White House on December 19, such a move would be unconstitutional.

“The framers believed, as Alexander Hamilton put it, that ‘the sense of the people should operate in the choice of the [president].’ But no nation had ever tried that idea before. So the framers created a safety valve on the people’s choice. Like a judge reviewing a jury verdict, where the people voted, the electoral college was intended to confirm — or not — the people’s choice. Electors were to apply, in Hamilton’s words, ‘a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice’ — and then decide. The Constitution says nothing about “winner take all.” It says nothing to suggest that electors’ freedom should be constrained in any way. Instead, their wisdom — about whether to overrule ‘the people’or not — was to be free of political control yet guided by democratic values. They were to be citizens exercising judgment, ?not cogs turning a wheel.”

Going on to argue that each vote cast on the ballot must have equal value, Lessig points out that nothing in the Constitution compels the Electors to vote for Donald Trump.

It remains unlikely that the Electoral College will elect Clinton ahead of Trump on December 19, but the recent campaigns, legal experts, and indeed the U.S. Constitution, certainly make a good case for it.

[Featured Image by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images]