If the majority of voters, say 60%, in a State vote for a particular candidate, is that State’s electoral college obliged to give its votes to the same candidate? Can it say, in essence, “stuff the voters”, we’re giving our votes to the other guy?
The state sets the rules on how the electors from that state are chosen, and those rules will be based on how the electors have voted – either “winner take all” (the usual rule) or some kind or proportionality. The state cannot just ignore how the voters decide.
Maine and Nebraska have splitsies enshrined in law, but a “faithless elector” of any state could vote differently than instructed by the people.
Thank you. Coming from a country where voting is uniform throughout the country, I find these anomalies very odd.
So do most of us.
But yes, it’s possible. Faithless elector - Wikipedia
The main explanation is that in the U.S., federal elections are almost entirely run by state governments, not by the federal government as they are in Australia.
This is somewhat misleading in response to the question asked.
In response to the OP: when we vote for President, we don’t vote for someone to be President. Instead, we vote for a slate of pre-selected electors each campaign has chosen. Presumably, these people will then vote for the candidate they have pledge to vote for when the “college” convenes in December and votes. Occasionally, an elector becomes “faithless” and votes for someone other than the person they pledged to vote for. Rarely does more than one such vote happen in a given election.
Some states have instituted laws which purport to nullify “faithless” electoral votes. The constitutionality of such laws has yet to be established.
In addition, the slates of electors are chosen by the state party leaders. Becoming an electoral college voter is a prize cherished by party loyalists and therefore a gift given to reward long-standing devotion to and work for the party. They are carefully considered and vetted before being named. That’s why the rare so-called faithless electors cast only symbolic votes in cases that cannot possibly change the results.
No matter how often people talk about the electoral college deciding an outcome, the actuality is almost inconceivable.
Well…yes, but no. I mean, when I the voter went into the polling station this afternoon, I had a ballot that said Barack Obama/Joe Biden and Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan and I put my mark by the pair that I want to win the Presidency/Vice Presidency.
I know that there’s this whole electoral college thing, but it’s pretty misleading the way the ballots are written, and the way the results are tabulated and being reported on the news right now. There are a whole very big lot of people who *think *they are, in fact, voting for the actual candidate(s).
Has it always been this complicated or have layers of complexity been added over the years?
Aside from the faithless elector laws, it’s been this way all along. And it’s really not that complex.
Am I the only one who feels that the Electoral College is at best unneeded and at worst idiotic? If we can get a tally of the popular vote by the end of Election Day on every news channel, why is it still used? It seems overly complicated and open to all sorts of corruption.
It’s always been like this, in terms of the structure of the electoral college. The way each state selected the electors has changed; some have even done it without a popular vote (in the very old days). And the vice president used to be the runner-up. Also, we’ve added more states and sped up the ability to communicate, so it’s gotten more complicated in that sense.
It must’ve taken months to work out who won, back in the day. I’ve just been watching CNN with their interactive map and wonder how it’s possible that anyone ever got elected.
If I can tack on an additional and related question here.
What sort of job is being an elector.
- Do they have any other duties apart from casting their vote in December?
- Is it a paid position?
- Is there any prestige to being an elector?
Cheers
The electors themselves are elected in every state. They’re not a static body that will vote whichever way. There are Romney elector-candidates and Obama elector-candidates, and they’re all high-level grandees in the state party. A faithless elector is burning bridges in addition to stuffing the voters.
I think they usually get to elect new electors if one dies or is unable to show up.
That’s up to the states. In Nebraska, they get $5 and travel expenses.
In the outside world, no, none whatsoever. I have no idea who Ohio’s electors will be and I don’t really care.
Within the state party, it’s a valued position because it shows that you’re in good with the people in power.
Why do you hate the Constitution? 
Actually, it’s relatively free of corruption. There have been few faithless electors, and such faithlessness has never altered the election. The real corruption is usually local, such as voting using names from cemeteries.* Of course, in the Hayes/Tilden farrago, the corruption was at the Federal level; that was probably the worst-handled election in U.S. history. But if there had been no electoral college – if the popular vote was what had mattered – much the same thing could have happened. The Federal Government could simply have refused to accept the votes from the states in question.
The principle of the U.S. Constitution is that the states are sovereign, not the Federal government…and not the people. However, the current guiding principle of U.S. democracy is that the People are sovereign. The E.C. is one of the few strong remaining bastions of States’ Rights, and they aren’t likely to give it up any time soon.
- (I had been misspelling “cemetary” all these years!)
Summary: American electoral processes have many many problems. The electoral college system may be one, but it’s not among the Twenty Worst Problems.
I won’t defend the electoral college system, but it isn’t quite as silly as some claim. For one thing, giving a predetermined number of votes to each state helps compensate for turnout variation. To see what I mean, suppose that Hurricane Sandy had hit a week after it did. In a popular-vote system, the Northeast would have been severely disenfranchised; with the electoral system, they retain their full vote quota(*).
In 2000, recounting the votes of two counties in Florida was considered to be an onerous and expensive task. If the Presidential votes are close in a popular-vote system, recounting every single ballot nationwide might be appropriate. Those who point to close elections as an argument against electors have it backward.
The electoral college system gives more weight to smaller states than they would get in a popular-vote system. One can debate whether that is good or bad, but it is intentional.
With the college, candidates need campaign only in swing states. Given the brutality of “modern” campaigns, non-swing state voters might argue this is a good thing! Since Ohio and Florida may contain a fair cross-section of “swing” voters, it is far from clear that it is a bad thing.
Selecting individuals to actually cast the electoral votes may seem anachronistic but is it more absurd than Commons slamming their door on Black Rod when the Queen summons them? Anyway, at $5 plus expenses, eliminating the electors will do little to reduce the deficit.
(*- Yes, the results might vary from “normal” if the storm affected different demographic groups differently.)
OK. Thanks. I somehow assumed they’d be independent, in the same way that the Australian Electoral Commission overseeas elections here.