Today is the date Secretary of State Paul Pate is to certify Iowa’s election results and on December 14 the state’s six presidential electors will gather at the state capitol to cast their votes in the Electoral College.
Kurt Brown of Primghar will be one of them. “Since Donald Trump won Iowa, the six presidential electors from the Republican Party will be casting their vote,” he says. “Four years ago, since Donald Trump took Iowa, I was also a presidential elector for the Republicans, and then four years prior to that I was a presidential elector for the Republicans, but since Barack Obama won the election (in Iowa) then the Democrats got to cast their six electoral votes at that time.”
However, Brown says there’s no state law that requires him to cast his Electoral College vote for the candidate who won the popular vote in Iowa.
“In some states, they require you to vote as the voters chose,” Brown says. “In other states, the presidential electors can be removed for not voting the way their state law requires.”
Brown says, as a result, he’s used to getting all sorts of pressure on how to vote.
“I had hundreds of phone calls,” Brown says “Four years ago, I had thousands of phone calls and emails trying to sway me.”
Iowa currently gets six votes in the Electoral College, one from each congressional district and two at-large electors. Brown is one of the at-large electors, chosen along with five others at the state GOP convention in June.
“You just basically go through a process of throwing your name out there at the county convention, the district convention and the state convention,” he says.
The Iowa Democratic Party approves its slate of electors at the party’s state convention. Other presidential candidates submit the names of electors with their nominating petitions, as Kanye West did this year when he qualified for the Iowa ballot.
(By Dennis Morrice, KLEM, Le Mars)