So when the electoral college meets up they can in theory vote to make someone else president right? Am I understanding the rules correctly? What would happen if they choose McCain for president?
Relevent wikipedia article on faithless electors.
Some states have laws requiring electors to vote for the candidate they should, but these laws have never been tested.
In theory they could elect, anyone president who meets the qualifications laid out in the US Constitution for president
They can indeed choose anyone they want (who meets the qualifications.)
Many states have laws requiring Electors to vote for the candidate to whom they are pledged. However, if an Elector broke one of those laws, their rogue vote would still count. And it’s an open question whether such laws would withstand Constitutional scrutiny.
There have been numerous rogues in the Electoral College throughout history, but they’ve never affected the outcome of an election. As usual, Wikipedia has an interesting list.
There is a law to make the electorals vote for whoever the state choose? Doesn’t this go agasint some kind of constitutional rule saying votes have to be free from any kinda persuasion
It’s not “whoever the state chooses”, it’s “Whoever you said you’d vote for when you ran for election.”
I’d argue that the Virginia delegation’s joint decision not to vote for Richard Johnson for Vice President changed the outcome of the 1836 election. As a result of losing those 23 electoral college votes, Johnson did not have a majority and the Vice Presidential election was decided by the Senate. Which chose Johnson anyway.
So while Johnson did eventually get the office, the Virginia delegation was successful in changing the outcome of the electoral college election.
The Electoral College doesn’t meet in one place. The electors for each state vote in their own state.
The purpose of the Electoral College was to set up a deliberative body to elect the president, but which was independent of Congress. Basically, states were to choose electors, who would deliberate and vote for the most qualified candidate. If no one got a majority (and it was assumed that would be the case most of the time), the House of Representatives would make the choice, but since the Electors weren’t members of the House, the names they gave would have been chosen without insider influence.
Of course, in actual practice, the electors are chosen by the political parties, and they won’t choose someone to be an elector in the first place unless they’re very confident that they’ll vote the way they’re supposed to.
Didn’t the electoral college start out as a way from keeping the important decision of who should be president away from the unwashed masses? My impression (granted, from high school American history class) was that the original idea was that local people would elect wise citizens to the electoral college, and that they would eventually select the president on their own, but this rather naive plan then immediately fell apart with the advent of political parties.
The original idea didn’t (and still does not - read the constitution) involve citizens voting for president at all.
That got added later, and is entirely the decision of individual states to allow citizens to vote for their electors. here is a previous thread about that.
Then McCain would be President. What makes this virtually impossible is that being a pledged elector is an honor reserved to people who are very involved/want a future in political politics in the state.
Imagine Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity being a McCain elector, and James Carville and Bill Clinton being Obama electors. Sure, in theory they could vote for the other guy, but it isn’t realistically going to happen.
I’ve always been in favor of the “neutron bomb” solution to the EC. Keep everything the way it is, but simply convert the EVs into numbers without having real electors actually vote.
Of course, that would require a constitutional amendment, and if you’re going to go to that length to “fix” the system (is it broken?), then why not abolish electoral votes altogether?
Because I like the idea of the EC system to give the smaller states a bigger bite of the pie. My amendment should sail through without much opposition.
While I don’t think the system is broken, in 2000 if two Bush electors had switched to Gore, then it would have gone to the House of Representatives. If three Bush electors switched, Gore would have been President.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there were operatives looking behind the scenes at that scenario.
Question: If we had a faithless elector, would we know who the elector was if he did not call a press conference afterwords? Are elector college ballots secret? Can we match the vote with the voter?
The mechanism of the vote is determined by each state legislature. Sometimes the ballots have been secret (famous example) but I believe most of them are recorded.
You had me until “still doesn’t”. See the 24th Amendment (1964) for an acknowledgement of the popular vote.
The 24th does not require popular elections for Electors, it only forbids poll taxes in the event of such elections.
But note that neither unclelem nor I said “requires”.