ATLANTA -- As members of the Electoral College prepare to choose Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States, some Republican electors say they are defending rural and small-town America against big-state liberalism and its support for national popular vote leader Hillary Clinton.
But those electors are still under pressure to select someone other than Trump, causing some to waver but yielding little evidence that Trump will fall short when electors convene in most state capitals today to cast their votes.
Carole Joyce of Arizona expected her role as a GOP elector to be pretty simple: She would meet the others in Phoenix and carry out a vote for Trump, who won the most votes in her state and whom she personally supported.
But then came the mail and the emails and the phone calls -- first hundreds, then thousands of voters worrying that Trump had an impulsive nature that could lead the country into war.
"Honestly, it had an impact," said Joyce, a 72-year-old Republican state committee member. "I've seen enough funerals. I'm tired of hearing bagpipes. ... But I signed a loyalty pledge. And that matters."
Mary Sue McClurkin, a Republican elector from Alabama, agreed with the need for loyalty to a state's vote.
"Our Founding Fathers established the Electoral College because those larger states, those larger areas, don't necessarily need to be the ones that rule," McClurkin said.
Former Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell, a GOP elector, said Democrats' strength on the coasts is enough to justify the Electoral College. "A presidential election decided each time by either California or New York," he said, would leave voters in Alaska and many other places "with no voice" in presidential politics.
Clinton's lead in California, the most populous state, is more than her national lead of about 2.6 million votes. She also won New York by about 1.7 million votes.
But Trump is in line to get 306 of the 538 electoral votes under the state-by-state distribution of electors used to choose presidents since 1789. Trump won rural areas, small towns and many small cities, including in states Clinton carried. Clinton won in the largest urban areas, including in Trump states.
McClurkin said many of the letters and emails she's received asking her to reconsider her vote have come from New York and California.
"I've not gotten any from a Southern state," she said.
The rancor about the role of electors started early in the campaign. In August, Baoky Vu, a GOP activist in Atlanta, said he planned to resign from the job because he was so morally opposed to Trump. Although he is still technically an elector, he plans to defer his voting responsibility to someone more willing -- an alternate who would be put in place today.
After the election, Vu started getting phone calls and emails asking him not to resign. He was asked instead to consider joining a coalition of electors hoping to vote against Trump. He declined.
"I don't think we should drag this election out any longer," Vu said. "And can you imagine if the electors overturned the results? If we attempt to change them in any way, you've got these far-right elements that are just going to go haywire."
But Democratic elector Eric Herde from Washington state argued that the country should scrap electoral votes in favor of the national ballot count. All Electoral College defenses, whether citing population or the genius of the Founding Founders, amount to "states mattering more than people," Herde said. "The argument that the person who got the most votes should win is still the better argument."
Mark Hersch, a 60-year-old Chicago-based marketing strategist, joined a group known as the Hamilton Electors, named for Alexander Hamilton. The group has been trying to find 37 Republicans willing to vote for someone else, a tipping point at which the responsibility of picking the president would shift to the U.S. House of Representatives.
Hersch said he was inspired by the movie 300, which depicts an ancient Spartan army's doomed stand against a Persian force that outnumbered it 1,000 to 1. The GOP-controlled House could vote for Trump anyway, he said, but the movie showed him the value in taking a stand.
"I would like to think we would be successful, but if not, we need to do all we could to prevent this man from being president," he said. Then he modified a line from the movie: "Prepare your breakfast, and eat hearty, for tonight, we will go to battle. This isn't 300, but 538."
Vinz Koller, a Democratic elector from Monterey County, Calif., is among those pushing for Democrats not to vote for Clinton, but instead to rally behind an option who would also be acceptable to Republicans, such as Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who ran against Trump in the GOP primaries. Koller said Hamilton and the Founding Fathers understood the need for the Electoral College.
"We have been getting a civic lesson we weren't prepared to get," Koller said. "They gave us the fail-safe emergency brake, in case the people got it wrong. And here we are, 200 years later. It's the last shot we have."
Information for this article was contributed by Robert Samuels and Ellen Nakashima of The Washington Post; and by Bill Barrow, Becky Bohrer, Deepti Hajela and David Lieb of The Associated Press.
A Section on 12/19/2016