General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAbout faithless electors.
This page is very informative on the issue.
Please check out https://www.fairvote.org/faithless_elector_state_laws for more information.
There are 33 states (plus the District of Columbia) that require electors to vote for a pledged candidate. Most of those states (16 plus DC) nonetheless do not provide for any penalty or any mechanism to prevent the deviant vote from counting as cast. Five states provide a penalty of some sort for a deviant vote, and 14 states provide for the vote to be canceled and the elector replaced (two states do both). The constitutionality of these laws was upheld by the Supreme Court in Chiafalo v. Washington on July 6, 2020.
Fiendish Thingy
(15,585 posts)Electors are selected by the party/campaign, and appointed by the governor. They are not generic people, they are two separate slates, each pledged to their candidate. Hillary is a Biden elector for NY.
No Biden electors will flip their votes to Trump, period.
radius777
(3,635 posts)on both sides.
It seems this time they're picking high level people, similar to how they pick superdelegates, to ensure they will vote correctly.
grantcart
(53,061 posts)Can you find a single case where a faithless elector went for the candidate of the other major party?
The person you are replying to is correct, its absurd. No elector in either party is going to go for the other party's candidate.
radius777
(3,635 posts)in a close electoral vote it could cause the would be president to lose narrowly and/or get thrown to the House.
In 2016 there were electors sympathetic to Bernie who iirc were threatening not to vote for Hillary.
Basically, the only way to be sure the electoral votes go how we want is to put 'superdelegate' types in as electors - which it seems what they're doing this time with Hillary as one of the electors.
greenjar_01
(6,477 posts)Thank you for being the voice of reason here.
Willto
(292 posts)I repeat stop.
Lady Freedom Returns
(14,120 posts)Link to tweet
?s=20
MineralMan
(146,286 posts)They're not people who are chosen at random. Faithless electors are vanishingly rare.