While electors across the country are reporting the receipt of death threats from distraught Hillary Clinton supporters, one Arizona elector, Jim O’Connor, has found a source of humor. O’Connor has chosen to ignore his hate mail and focus on the logic behind the pleas for Hillary.
That logic is flawed but funny, according to O’Connor.
In an interview on the James T. Harris radio show on Monday, O’Connor, a seasoned and mild-mannered retired businessman, described the thousands of emails and hundreds of phone calls he has received since the electors’ information was made public.
O’Connor told Harris that he did not know how his personal information became public, but he shrugged it off as the price of living in a republic.
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Jeff Strabone’s How to write to the Electoral College Instructions It’s simple. Just supply your own information, print, sign, and mail. Here’s it is step by step: 1. Use the Replace command to replace ‘myname’ (don’t type the quotes) with your name (first and last). 2. Use the Replace command to replace ‘myaddress1’ with the first line of your address. 3. Use the Replace command to replace ‘myaddress2’ with the second line of your address. 4. Replace ‘December 5’ with today’s date. 5. Print the letters. 6. Sign the letters. 7. Put the letters in envelopes, close the envelopes, address the envelopes, stamp the envelopes. Remember: the electoral college votes on December 19, so please mail your letters in time to be delivered. *If you’re printing all 261 letters, it will be a lot easier if you also print the labels. Here’s how to do that: 8. Download the document ‘LabelsAll.doc’. 9. Load your printer with nine sheets of Avery Standard 5160 labels. 10. Print the labels and attach them to your envelopes. Note: If you want to customize the letter, feel free. That’s why I uploaded the letter in Word rather than as a pdf. Just use the Replace command to make the change everywhere. Cost of 261 forty-seven-cent stamps: $122.67. (Or just print the letters for your state if you’d prefer.) That’s a lot of money for many of us, but not too much to pay for our last chance to stop Trump from becoming president. Thank you for doing this! Jeff Strabone |
Wikipedia has listed all electors by state without contact information. Then there are sites like Jeff Strabone’s that not only give out the personal information the postal addresses of 260 of the 306 electors. Strabone not only shares the addresses of Arizona’s electors, he has prepared letters to each of them to be copied and sent by others like him who are eager to alter the outcome of the election. Strabone claims that the “purpose of this site is to help you send your own signed postal letters to the members of the Electoral College from states won by Donald Trump to ask them, respectfully, not to vote for Trump.”
“The electors have already received a ton of e-mail and news attention, but a personal letter means a lot more,” Strabone on his website, “A single good old-fashioned, voter-to-voter personal letter is probably worth a thousand e-mails.”
O’Connor says he has only received a little “snail mail,” which he dismissed out of hand. However, he has received over 15,000 emails. He told Harris, “I can’t tell you if there was anything threatening in there because I’ve only read about three of the emails, but I had heard that electors have been threatened.”
He has successfully dodged the hate, but O’Connor did take one of the over 300 calls he has received from “area codes across the world.”
“I took a call from a very sweet sounding lady from Ohio,” said O’Connor, “and she started the call out with the incredible praise. ‘Oh Mr. O’Connor you must be a very highly valued citizen of Arizona, and worthy of great praise, and other things.’ Just blowing smoke. It was so thick I couldn’t find myself. So after that, she said, ‘so sir as a man of integrity, I ask you to exercise your conscience and become an unfaithful elector.’ That is literally the term she used. So I said, ‘Ma’am can I ask you a question,’ and she said ‘sure.’ And I said, ‘do you have any idea of the irony in what you just asked?’ And she didn’t understand what I was talking about. So I said, ‘Let me put it to you in a different context. Let’s suppose you and I are getting married, and we are are at an altar someplace, and I raise my hand and say: I promise to be unfaithful to you anytime I feel like it. Would that be a good deal for you?’ Her response was, ‘Well now that you mention it, I really wish they called it something else. I don’t like the word unfaithful.’”
Neither does O’Connor, and he has no intention of being a “faithless elector.” Faithless electors are, according to Fairvote.org, “members of the Electoral College who, for whatever reason, do not vote for their party’s designated candidate.”
“Since the founding of the Electoral College, there have been 157 faithless electors. 71 of these votes were changed because the original candidate died before the day on which the Electoral College cast its votes. Three of the votes were not cast at all as three electors chose to abstain from casting their electoral vote for any candidate,” reports Fairvote.org. “The other 82 electoral votes were changed on the personal initiative of the elector.”
The Washington Times reports that “Republican members of the Electoral College are facing pressure, harassment and even death threats as disgruntled opponents of President-elect Donald Trump mount a last-ditch push to keep him out of the White House.”
CNN reported that the youth chairman of the Michigan Republican Party, Michael Banerian, has been “threatened with violence.”
“Obviously, this election cycle was pretty divisive. Unfortunately it’s bled over into the weeks following the election and I have been inundated with death threats, death wishes, generally angry messages trying to get me to change my vote to Hillary Clinton or another person, and unfortunately, it’s gotten a little out of control.” Banerian told CNN. “I’ve had people talk about putting a bullet in the back of my mouth. I’ve had death wishes or people just saying ‘I hope you die.’ Or, ‘do society a favor, throw yourself in front of a bus.'”
As a leader in the Republican Party, O’Connor has expressed concern for those who have been threatened and calls on the DOJ to investigate threats as they would have surely done had Clinton supporters been threatened.
For a mature elector like O’Connor, the vitriol rolls off his back. He is so unfazed by it, and so committed to Trump and the change he represents, that O’Connor is now in the running for the top spot in the AZGOP. He had headed up the largest Republican legislative district in the state and hopes to grow the Party as he had done there. “I have always considered myself an older guy,” said O’Connor, “but if we just elected Donald J. Trump, who is also a baby boomer like myself, as president of the United States, the least I could do is help out here in Arizona further shaking up establishment politics.”