| Chapter 1: | A Risk to the Republic? |
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failed to materialize four years later. The 2004 campaign seemed to end the night of the election.
Unlike the 2004 vote, the 2008 election did not carry the same promise of lawyers flown by jet to troubled hotspots to contest election-night chicanery. The margins of victory achieved by Obama throughout the states were not in question. Instead, lawsuits were filed challenging the legitimacy of Obama’s citizenship and thus his eligibility to become president under the Constitution. These challenges differed dramatically from the election-related challenges of 2000 and 2004. Though lawsuits challenging Obama’s citizenship gained a great deal of publicity in the days following the 2008 election, another more secretive campaign was carried out throughout the United States, aimed at a very specific audience—presidential electors.
The campaign targeting electors received little coverage but was every bit as important as the legal challenges of 2000 and 2004. It did not target states with close electoral margins but rather virtually all presidential electors throughout the country. A number of electors surveyed took time to note the onslaught of letters, phone calls, and e-mails they received in the wake of the 2008 popular presidential vote.
Most of this elector lobbying centered on Barack Obama’s citizenship. Letters suggested that Obama was not a citizen and could be “vulnerable to domestic or foreign blackmail, or pressed for favors not in the best interests of the average American” (personal communication with elector, July 2009).3 Electors were asked to consider joining a class action suit to subpoena Obama’s original birth certificate; to request that a team of forensic scientists examine the birth certificate; and if the tests revealed the birth certificate was invalid, to refuse to vote at their respective Electoral College meetings. Calls to duty, patriotism, and the Constitution were made in the barrage of information sent to electors. But as the meeting of electors approached, the tone of the letters changed. In addition to attaching petitions with thousands of names, one lobbyist noted: