The Hacked Election

The meeting of the US Electoral College to choose the president is usually little more than a “formality”, said Jonathan Martin in The New York Times. “Yet as with so much else in this turbulent election year”, this one was “punctuated by anger and dissent”.

One New York elector, Bill Clinton, cast his vote for his wife, and then suggested that she only lost because of outside interference – “the Russians and the FBI”. Anti-Trump groups had hoped that they might persuade enough electors to withhold their votes. But members of the college are bound by tradition, and in some cases by state law, to support their party’s candidates; and in the event, only two Republican electors declined to vote for the president-elect (while five Democrats declined to vote for Hillary Clinton). Despite the protests across America, and the recounts, it was inevitable, said Olivia Nuzzi on The Daily Beast. “Come 20 January 2017, Donald J. Trump will travel to Washington, place his hand on the Bible, and become president of the United States of America.”