Faithless electors in the 2016 United States presidential election

In the 2016 US presidential election, ten members of the Electoral College voted or attempted to vote for a candidate different from the ones to whom they were pledged. Three of these votes were invalidated under the faithless elector laws of their respective states, and the elector either subsequently voted for the pledged candidate or was replaced by someone who did. The faithless electors who opposed Donald Trump were part of a movement dubbed the Hamilton Electors.

About Faithless electors in the 2016 United States presidential election in brief

Summary Faithless electors in the 2016 United States presidential election In the 2016 US presidential election, ten members of the Electoral College voted or attempted to vote for a candidate different from the ones to whom they were pledged. Three of these votes were invalidated under the faithless elector laws of their respective states, and the elector either subsequently voted for the pledged candidate or was replaced by someone who did. As a result of the seven successfully cast faithless votes, the Democratic Party nominee, Hillary Clinton, lost five of her pledged electors while the Republican Party nominee and then president-elect, Donald Trump, lost two. The faithless electors who opposed Donald Trump were part of a movement dubbed the Hamilton Electors co-founded by Micheal Baca of Colorado and Bret Chiafalo of Washington. The electors advocated for voting their conscience to prevent the election of someone they viewed as unfit for the presidency as prescribed by Alexander Hamilton in No. 68 of The Federalist Papers. In the unique system of presidential elections of the United States, the president is not determined directly by the popular vote of the national electorate, but indirectly through the mechanism of Electoral College determined by cumulative wins of the popular votes of state electorates. In this system of representative democracy, a presidential candidate is deemed to have won a presidential race if that candidate wins a simple majority of the electoral college vote. In 1824, John Quincy Adams lost the electoral vote despite having the highest popular vote and having received fewer electoral votes than his opponent.

Only four times in American history has a candidate lost the popularvote but achieved the presidency, thereby assuming the presidency; in the last three such cases, no candidate polled an absolute majority of votes. The six faithless vice-presidential votes in 2016 are short of the record for that office, without considering whether the vice-Presidential candidates were still living, as multiple previous elections have had more than six faithlessness vice- presidents. The sevenfaithless votes for president were the most to defect from presidential candidates who were still alive in electoral college history, surpassing the six electors who defected from James Madison in the 1808 election. This number of defections has been exceeded only once: in 1872, a record 63 of 66 electors who were originally pledged to losing candidate Horace Greeley cast their votes for someone else. In that case, the electors were subjected to public pressure, including threats of death if they did not remain faithful to voting for Trump. By the time they switched their votes away from Trump’s opponent, it was numerically impossible to achieve their stated goal as all but 30 of the Trump-pledged electoral votes had already been cast, with 37 votes needed to switch to deny Trump an outright victory in the Electoral Electoral College. However, at the time of the election, thirty-one states and the District of Columbia had laws requiring their electors tovote for their pledged candidate, and courts issued conflicting opinions of the constitutionality of those laws.