Don Kass
One of the six Iowa Republicans chosen to cast votes in the Electoral College this year says he will support Donald Trump if Trump wins Iowa.
“I have the right, I actually have the constitutional right to kind of go off script and vote for somebody other than the winner,” says Don Kass, who lives near Remsen in northwest Iowa’s Plymouth County. “I would never do that.”
A Democratic “elector” in the state of Washington has said he will not vote for Hillary Clinton, even if Clinton carries his state. Iowa’s six “electors” will gather in December and it will be Kass and five other Republicans if Trump wins the state. If Clinton wins Iowa, “electors” from the Iowa Democratic Party will cast the state’s six Electoral College votes.
Kass says the process forces the candidates to pay attention to the entire country, not just the nation’s most populous states.
“There’s a certain amount of regulating or tamping down of wide political mood swing with the Electoral College and that’s a good thing,” Kass says. “It’s another one of those checks and balances.”
Iowa “wouldn’t matter” if it weren’t for the Electoral College, according to Kass.
“But because we’re a swing state and because the Electoral College exists, Iowa is going to be a big factor in this election,” Kass says.
In 2004, Kass was one of the country’s 286 “electors” who kept George W. Bush in the White House for a second term. To win, a presidential candidate must get at least 270 votes in the Electoral College.
(Reporting by Dennis Morrice, KLEM, Le Mars; additional reporting by Radio Iowa’s O. Kay Henderson)