Faithless elector
Candidates for electors are nominated by state political parties in the months prior to Election Day. There have been a total of 165 instances of faithlessness as of 2016. In 14 states, votes contrary to the pledge are voided and the respective electors are replaced. In 2020, the Supreme Court also ruled in Chiafalo v. Washington that states are free to enforce laws that bind electors to voting for the winner of the popular vote in their state.
About Faithless elector in brief
A faithless elector is an elector who does not vote for the candidates for U.S. President and U. S. Vice President for whom the elector had pledged to vote and instead votes for another person. Candidates for electors are nominated by state political parties in the months prior to Election Day. There have been a total of 165 instances of faithlessness as of 2016, 63 of which occurred in 1872 when Horace Greeley died after Election Day but before the Electoral College convened. In 14 states, votes contrary to the pledge are voided and the respective electors are replaced, and in two of these states they may also be fined. Colorado was the first state to void an elector’s faithless vote, which occurred during the 2016 election. In 2020, the Supreme Court also ruled in Chiafalo v. Washington that states are free to enforce laws that bind electors to voting for the winner of the popular vote in their state. As of 2020, 33 states and the District of Columbia have laws that require electors to vote for their party’s presidential nominee. The court ruled that states have the right to remove potential electors who refuse to pledge to the candidate their party supports and remove the potential electors from the election. However, the court also wrote: The court also ruled that the right of states to remove electors to refuse to support their party’s presidential nominee should not be limited to the state level, and that states should be able to enforce the pledge at the federal level as well as at the state and local levels.
The U. S. Constitution does not specify a notion of pledging; no federal law or constitutional statute binds an electors’ vote to anything. The parties have generally been successful in keeping their electors faithful, leaving out the rare cases in which a candidate died before the elector was able to cast a vote. Nearly all have voted for third party candidates or non-candidates, as opposed to switching their support to a major opposing candidate. In some states, high-ranking andor well-known state officials up to and including governors often serve as electors whenever possible. In other states, such as Oklahoma, Virginia, and North Carolina, electors are nomination in party conventions. In Pennsylvania, the campaign committee of each candidate names their candidates for elector. In 2004, Minnesota amended its law to require the public balloting of the electors’ votes and invalidate any vote cast for someone other than the elector who was pledged to. Minnesota also invoked this law for the first time in 2016 when an elector pledged to Hillary Clinton attempted toVote for Bernie Sanders instead. Until 2008, Minnesota’s electors cast secret ballots. Although the final count would reveal the occurrence of faithless votes, it was impossible to determine which electors were faithless. Although it is possible to determine if an unknown elector was faithless in 2004, the state changed its state law in the wake of that year’s election to void the elector’s votes and replace them with a new elector.
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This page is based on the article Faithless elector published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 05, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
