ANCHORAGE — A Hillary Clinton supporter has sued Alaska’s three electoral college voters, trying to prevent them from casting votes for President-elect Donald Trump.
Janice Park claims in her civil lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Anchorage that their votes will violate her Fifth Amendment right of equal protection and deny her the principal of one person, one vote.
Lawyers for the state of Alaska in a late Thursday hearing said the case should be dismissed because it doesn’t have merit.
Park, who is representing herself, relied on a similar lawsuit in California for her case. That lawsuit was dismissed and deemed frivious by the California District Court.
U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Burgess said he would give Park until 10 a.m. Friday to file any supplemental briefings and point him to any other cases besides the California lawsuit that would bolster her case. He expected he would issue an opinion shortly after receiving those briefs.
Her lawsuit names Alaska’s three Republican electors, former Gov. Sean Parnell of Palmer, Jacqueline Tupuo of Juneau and Carolyn Leman of Anchorage, incorrectly identified in the lawsuit as Carol.
Park bases her lawsuit on the fact that Clinton is winning the popular vote, but will lose the electoral college. Trump won 306 electoral votes, more than the 270 needed to win an election.
The popular vote doesn’t decide the winner of the presidential race, and her lawsuit doesn’t note that Trump defeated Clinton by nearly 47,000 votes in Alaska.
However, Park claims that if Alaska’s three electors vote for Trump on Monday in Juneau as expected, they “will effectively cause a single vote for Clinton to be valued less than a single vote for Trump.” She estimated her vote will count about .97 of a Trump vote, and that percentage will only decrease if Clinton’s nationwide popular vote total increases.
“Counting each Clinton vote, including Park’s vote, as only equal to approximately .99, that is, quantifiably less than each Trump vote, is fundamentally unfair, and serves no legitimate, let alone compelling government interest,” she wrote.
