AUSTIN — Texas members of the Electoral College on Monday called on state legislatures in four battleground states carried by President-elect Joe Biden to appoint alternative slates of electors.
The Texas electors passed the resolution, which also slammed the U.S. Supreme Court for dismissing a Texas challenge to presidential election results, after casting all 38 of their votes for President Donald Trump.
Trump won 52.1% of the Texas vote to 46.5% for Biden and thus was expected to win the state electoral college vote. Trump, however, lost several key states, giving the national Electoral College victory to Biden.
On Friday, the Supreme Court turned away an effort by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to block Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin from certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.
A resolution authored by elector Mark Ramsey, an oil and gas engineer, condemned the court and criticized the election as a “clearly unconstitutional process.”
The resolution called for lawmakers in the four battleground states to set aside the election results and appoint their own electors. It also called for the congressional delegations of those states to object to those “unconstitutionally appointed electors.”
“When other countries have faced massive election fraud, the end result has been a collapse of rights, a collapse of the economy and an inevitable slide to tyranny,” Ramsey said in support of his resolution.
His resolution, he said, was meant to show how the U.S. “can again be a shining light and not take a destructive pathway.”
The resolution passed 34-4, after electors decided to strip away language condemning “the moral cowardice” of the Supreme Court after another elector argued such language would make the Texas electors appear “childish, impertinent and angry.”
The Electoral College is the group of presidential electors required by the Constitution to form every four years for the sole purpose of electing the president and vice president.
It has 538 members, with the number apportioned to each state based on its number of representatives in the House plus one for each senator. The District of Columbia gets three, despite the fact that the home to Congress has no vote in Congress.
To become a presidential elector candidate in Texas, a person must be nominated as a political party’s elector candidate in accordance with party rules or named as an elector candidate by an independent or write-in candidate for president, according to state law.
Texas law doesn’t require electors to back the candidate who got the most popular votes in the state. There is a party pledge to that effect, but no law.
Four years ago, two electors deviated from that pledge: Stephen Christopher Suprun Jr. of Dallas voted for Ohio Gov. John Kasich, instead of Donald Trump, and Bill Greene voted for former U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, even though he wasn’t a candidate for president that year.
That vote came a month after an East Texas elector resigned from the Electoral College because he said he could not cast his ballot for Trump.
“I do not see how Donald Trump is biblically qualified to serve in the office of the presidency,” Art Sisneros, a welding supply salesman, wrote at the time.
