The animating concept behind the Trump campaign will be chaos. This is what history shows us fascists do when given the chance to participate in democratic political campaigns: They create chaos. They do it because chaos works to their advantage. They revel in it, because they can see how profoundly chaos unnerves democratic-republicans—everyone, that is, whether liberal or conservative, who believes in the basic idea of a representative government that is built around neutral rules. Fascism exists to pulverize neutral rules.
So they campaign with explicit intention to instill a sense of chaos. And then comes the topper: They have the audacity to insist that the only solution to the chaos—that they themselves have either grossly exaggerated or in some cases created!—is to vote for them: “You see, there is nothing but chaos afoot, and only we can restore order!”
How common are faithless electors?
How willing is the system to punish them? And if not the system, how willing are the people?
My question is a statistical inquiry. Your question is a bit more complex, I’m not even sure what that data would look like.
I was able to find this at least.
Not very. The real problem is straight up fake electors. With the State Secretary office sending a legitimate group and the legislature sending another.
All they need to do is stall that process long enough to either toss the election into Congress or have SCOTUS illegally intervene again
The real problem is no one votes. It’s the bare minimum level of effort. It’s the participation trophy. They can do all that because we put them there with embarrassingly bad voter turnout. We spend more time complaining than actually voting.
All of those problems are the symptoms of an unrepresentative government, and a government tends to represent the people who vote for them. If no one votes, they’ll listen to the highest bidder.