Elector Art Sisneros will be replaced when Lone Star electors meet on December 19

♦By Rich Shumate, Chicken Fried Politics.com editor

HOUSTON (CFP) — A Christian conservative presidential elector in Texas has resigned rather than cast a vote for Donald Trump, dismissing the New York real estate mogul as not “biblically qualified” to be president.

Former Texas elector Art Sisneros (Courtesy Art Sisneros via Texas Monthly)

In a November 26 post on his personal blog announcing his resignation, Art Sisneros said he could neither vote for Trump nor break a pledge he made to the Texas Republican Party to support the winner of the November 8 election.

“If Trump is not qualified and my role, both morally and historically, as an elected official is to vote my conscience, then I cannot and will not vote for Donald Trump for president. I believe voting for Trump would bring dishonor to God,” Sisneros said.

Under state law, the rest of Texas’s electors will select a replacement for Sisneros when they convene in Austin on December 19 to cast their votes for president and vice president.

Sisneros said he had received “hundreds of angry messages” after commenting publicly about his reluctance to vote for Trump, but none of them convinced him to change his mind.

“The people will get their vote. They will get their Skittles for dinner,” he said. “I will sleep well at night knowing I neither gave in to their demands nor caved to my convictions. I will also mourn the loss of our republic.”

Sisneros was picked as one of the Lone Star State’s 38 presidential electors at the state GOP convention in May, about two weeks before Trump won enough delegates to clinch the party’s nomination.

Texas was one of just two Southern states that Trump failed to carry during the primary season, losing to the state’s junior U.S. senator, Ted Cruz.

In the general election, Trump won 52 percent of the vote in Texas and carried 227 of the state’s 254 counties. However, state law does not bind electors to vote for the candidate who won most votes, although the Texas Republican Party requires electors to sign a pledge to do so.

Sisneros said he resigned rather than violate that pledge by voting for someone other than Trump.

“I have sinned in signing that pledge,” Sisneros said in his post. “I humbly confess that it was wrong for me to do so. I am grateful for the forgiveness I have in Christ for all my foolishness.”