Born in Seattle, Bret became an activist at a young age. At 17, he spent every weekend volunteering on an initiative to legalize marijuana for medical use. He has attended every Caucus since he was 18, volunteered for a wide variety of campaigns and was a State Delegate for Howard Dean. In 2004, he was the Western Washington Volunteer Director for Moveon.org.
In 2016, Bret became a Democratic Presidential Elector for the 2nd Congressional District. Believing Electors should be more than “rubber-stamps,” he took his job seriously and worked to educate himself about the history and role of the Electoral College. After the general election, Bret realized that we were facing the moment in history the Electoral College had been designed to protect us from, and he co-founded Hamilton Electors to encourage his fellow Electors to put country before party and vote their conscience.
For the next 40 days, he led an unprecedented fight to stop Donald Trump from becoming President of the United States. Federalist Paper #68, written by Alexander Hamilton, described one of the main jobs of Electors as stopping any candidate who was unqualified, a demagogue, and influenced by foreign powers. Hamilton Electors were among the first to challenge Trump’s legitimacy and succeeded in creating a national conversation around the role of the Electoral College in our democracy.
