With Trump running, and rumors of Russian interference in the election, I was speculating on how a future billionaire or foreign government could tamper with the Presidential election. I thought about the electoral college, and how it’s a lot easier to target and coerce 50 voters than even a few thousand.
Then I wondered if that was even possible. If, like in public voting, the ballots are secret, then it’d become a lot more difficult, especially in states with lots of votes (the very ones more likely to be targeted by such conspiracies).
Google wasn’t helpful to this question. Can someone enlighten me?
Electors are chosen for their pledges to support the winning candidates so they have to reveal their bona fides to the parties that nominate them. In some states, at least it used to be that the electors’ names were on the Presidential ballot.
There are 538 voters in the electoral college, so your conspiracy may have to be a bit bigger than you assume.
It’s up to the state. Some states require electors to vote publicly. Some even impose penalties on “faithless electors” who don’t vote for their declared candidate, which would only work if you knew how all the electors voted. Other states have electors vote confidentially. In one recent election, Minnesota had a faithless elector who voted for John Edwards instead of John Kerry. Since Kerry lost the election by a wide margin this was irrelevant. But to this day, Minnesota’s private electoral ballot means that no one knows who the faithless elector was.
You can review the number of electors who voted for each candidate but not the name of the elector who voted for each candidate. I believe different states have different processes for certifying the results of the electoral vote and transmitting the results to the Senate. If you look at Minnesota’s certificate of vote for that election, all the electors had to certify the vote total including the vote for Edwards, but you still can’t tell who cast that vote.
How, exactly, do the electors cast their vote? I saw it speculated in another thread that the electoral college as a body could decide not to elect Trump, but do they actually meet as a body? Is there any opportunity for deliberation, discussion or coordination?
I actually thought it quite likely if Trump won by one or two electoral votes (or tied) that a rogue elector would try to swing the vote to Clinton (or create a tie, throwing it to the House), but with a large difference in pledged votes, I can’t imagine a large number of electors independently deciding to go rogue with no hope (individually) of affecting the outcome. (Though wouldn’t it be hilarious if, with no desire to actually change the outcome, a large number of Republican electors decide to cast a solitary protest vote for someone else and end up giving it to Clinton? Unlikely, but hilarious.)
ETA: Somehow I didn’t see Tired and Cranky’s post before I typed mine. That post suggests (as I thought I remembered) that each state’s electors casts their votes separately, not at some sort of plenary gathering.
That’s not correct at all. And he was hardly ‘faithless’, it was a simple mistake. As Matt was approaching age 90, he just misunderstood the instructions and put his Vice-Presidential Ballot in the box first. He recognized the mistake, and tried to correct his ballot, but the Secretary of State (Republican) suddenly decided that there was a rule that electoral ballots could not be corrected. So John Kerry got one less Electoral vote than he should have.
The ten of those that I sampled did not state individual votes but the aggregate of the state’s votes plus a list of the state’s electors. A distinction without a difference for 2012 when each state’s electoral votes were unanimous, but would the format of the documents be different if that were not the case?
No, but the identity of the electors nearly are. You just voted for one – do you know his/her name? It would be possible to find out, but even the news media doesn’t bother. They have the same status as the delegates your local party sent to the state capital to nominate those candidates in the first place. I was a delegate to a state party convention once, nobody knows that and nobody cared, but there was nothing “secret” about it.
Which would appear to open the door to shenanigans.
In states with few votes the defector might be deducible, but in the big states, they could vote as they pleased (whether because of conscience, blackmail, or bribery), without fear of consequences.
In fact, when it comes to the close elections of our history, how can we be certain that bribery or blackmailing of electors have not affected outcomes?
At this point, I am calling bullshit on the claims in this narrative. There was no attempt to correct the ballot and no sudden ad hoc Republican ruling.
Matthew Little was not “approaching 90,” he was 83, which I guess is approaching 90 as long as you aren’t dead yet but it’s more “About 80.” Little was a pretty smart guy and a civil rights fighter his whole life. not some doddering old fool, and assuming he made the error is pure conjecture, not fact. (Also, all ten electors were old.)
Actual electors who were there reported surprise and confusion when the votes were formally counted; it was clearly a surprise, which, obviously, it would not have been had someone said “oh no, I put in the wrong name, please let me fix it!”