U. S. Electoral College: Who Are the Electors? Qualifications to be an Elector? How Do They Vote? Video
In 158 instances, electors have cast their votes for President or Vice President in a manner different from that prescribed by the legislature of the state they represented.
What are the qualifications to be an Elector?
The U.S. Constitution contains very few provisions relating to the qualifications of Electors. Article II, section 1, clause 2 provides that no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.
As a historical matter, the 14th Amendment provides that State officials who have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the United States or given aid and comfort to its enemies are disqualified from serving as Electors. This prohibition relates to the post-Civil War era.
Each state’s Certificates of Ascertainment confirms the names of its appointed electors. A state’s certification of its electors is generally sufficient to establish the qualifications of electors.
Who selects the Electors?
The process for selecting Electors varies throughout the United States. Generally, the political parties nominate Electors at their State party conventions or by a vote of the party’s central committee in each State. Each candidate will have their own unique slate of potential Electors as a result of this part of the selection process.
Electors are often chosen to recognize service and dedication to their political party. They may be State-elected officials, party leaders, or persons who have a personal or political affiliation with the Presidential candidate.
On Election Day, the voters in each State choose the Electors by casting votes for the presidential candidate of their choice. The Electors’ names may or may not appear on the ballot below the name of the candidates running for President, depending on the procedure in each State.
Are there restrictions on who the Electors can vote for?
There is no Constitutional provision or Federal law that requires Electors to vote according to the results of the popular vote in their States. Some States, however, require Electors to cast their votes according to the popular vote. These pledges fall into two categories—Electors bound by State law and those bound by pledges to political parties.
The U.S. Supreme Court has held that the Constitution does not require that Electors be completely free to act as they choose and therefore, political parties may extract pledges from electors to vote for the parties’ nominees. Some State laws provide that so-called “faithless Electors”
Of those, 71 votes were changed because the original candidate died before the elector was able to cast a vote. Two votes were not cast at all when electors chose to abstain from casting their electoral vote for any candidate.
The remaining 85 were changed by the elector’s personal interest, or perhaps by accident. Usually, the faithless electors act alone. An exception was the U.S. presidential election of 1836, in which 23 Virginia electors conspired to change their vote together.
. Thus, the parties have generally been successful in keeping their electors faithful, leaving out the cases in which a candidate died before the elector was able to cast a vote.
Twenty-four states have laws to punish faithless electors. While no faithless elector has ever been punished, the constitutionality of state pledge laws was brought before the Supreme Court in 1952 (Ray v. Blair, 343 U.S. 214).
No Legal Requirement
Electors in these States are not bound by State Law to cast their vote for a specific candidate:
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ARIZONA |
MISSOURI |
List of faithless electors
Electors do not have to vote for the candidate who received the most votes in any particular state. The following is a list of all faithless electors (in chronological order). The number preceding each entry is the number of faithless electors for the given year.
| Election year | Faithless electors | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1796 | 1 | Samuel Miles, an elector from Pennsylvania, was pledged to vote for Federalist presidential candidate John Adams, but voted for Democratic Republican candidate Thomas Jefferson. He cast his other presidential vote as pledged for Thomas Pinckney. (This election took place prior to the passage of the 12th Amendment, so there were not separate ballots for president and vice president.) |
| 1800 | — | New York elector Anthony Lispenard demanded to be able to cast a secret ballot, rather than a public one as state law required, apparently because he wanted to cast both of his votes for Aaron Burr instead of one each for Burr and Thomas Jefferson. This demand was necessary to force Burr’s election as President, since voting for Burr and someone else would have (in theory) simply created a deadlock in the electoral college and a run-off vote, which Jefferson would have likely won. However, Lispenard’s demand was rejected by the state, and he voted as pledged, for Jefferson and Burr.[2] Ironically, errors in the Democratic-Republican voting strategy meant that Jefferson and Burr ended up tying 73-73 in the electoral college, meaning that Lispenard could have caused Burr to become President all along by simply not casting his second vote, or voting for someone who was not a candidate, although he had no way of knowing this would be the case when he voted. |
| 1808 | 6 | Six electors from New York were pledged to vote for Democratic Republican James Madison as President and George Clinton as Vice President. Instead, they voted for Clinton to be President, with three voting for Madison as Vice President and the other three voting for James Monroe to be Vice President. |
| 1812 | 4 | Three electors pledged to vote for Federalist vice presidential candidate Jared Ingersoll voted for Democratic Republican Elbridge Gerry. One Ohio elector did not vote. |
| 1820 | 1 | William Plumer pledged to vote for Democratic Republican candidate James Monroe, but he cast his vote for John Quincy Adams who was also a Democratic Republican, but was not a candidate in the 1820 election. Some historians contend that Plumer did not feel that the Electoral College should unanimously elect any President other than George Washington, but this claim is disputed. (Monroe lost another three votes because three electors died before casting ballots and were not replaced.) |
| 1828 | 7 | Seven (of nine) electors from Georgia refused to vote for vice presidential candidate John C. Calhoun. All seven cast their vice presidential votes for William Smith instead. |
| 1832 | 32 | Two National Republican Party electors from the state of Maryland refused to vote for presidential candidate Henry Clay and did not cast a vote for him or for his running mate. All 30 electors from Pennsylvania refused to support the Democratic vice presidential candidate Martin Van Buren, voting instead for William Wilkins. |
| 1836 | 23 | The Democratic Party nominated Richard Mentor Johnson of Kentucky as their vice presidential candidate. The 23 electors from Virginia refused to support Johnson with their votes because of the fact that he had previously lived with and fathered children with an African-American woman. As a result, although the Democratic presidential nominee Martin van Buren won a majority of electoral votes, no vice-presidential candidate won a majority. The decision was therefore made by the U.S. Senate. The Senate elected Johnson as the Vice President, including votes for Johnson by both of Virginia’s senators. |
| 1860 | — | In New Jersey, where a fusion ticket was attempted, a Democratic supporter of Douglas refused to issue fusion tickets that would have supported Breckinridge. As a result, only three Democratic electors were chosen (all supporters of Douglas), and the other four electors chosen were Republican supporters of Abraham Lincoln.[3] |
| 1872 | 63 | 63 electors for Horace Greeley changed their votes after Greeley’s death, which occurred before the electoral vote could be cast. Greeley’s remaining three electors cast their presidential votes for Greeley and had their votes discounted by Congress. |
| 1896 | 4 | The Democratic Party and the People’s Party both ran William Jennings Bryan as their presidential candidate, but ran different candidates for Vice President. The Democratic Party nominated Arthur Sewall and the People’s Party nominated Thomas E. Watson. The People’s Party won 31 electoral votes but four of those electors voted with the Democratic ticket, supporting Bryan as President and Sewall as Vice President. |
| 1948 | 1 | Two Tennessee electors were on both the Democratic Party and the States’ Rights Democratic Party slates. When the Democratic Party slate won, one of these electors voted for the Democratic nominees Harry Truman and Alben Barkley. The other, Preston Parks, cast his votes for States’ Rights Democratic Party candidates Strom Thurmond and Fielding Wright, making him a faithless elector. |
| 1956 | 1 | Alabama Elector W. F. Turner, pledged for Democrats Adlai Stevenson and Estes Kefauver, cast his votes for Walter Burgwyn Jones and Herman Talmadge. |
| 1960 | 1 | Oklahoma Elector Henry D. Irwin, pledged for Republicans Richard Nixon and Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., cast his presidential electoral vote for Democratic non-candidate Harry Flood Byrd and his vice presidential electoral vote for Republican Barry Goldwater. (Fourteen unpledged electors also voted for Byrd for president, but supported Strom Thurmond, then a Democrat, for vice president.) |
| 1968 | 1 | North Carolina Elector Lloyd W. Bailey, pledged for Republicans Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, cast his votes for American Independent Party candidates George Wallace and Curtis LeMay. |
| 1972 | 1 | Virginia Elector Roger MacBride, pledged for Republicans Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, cast his electoral votes for Libertarian candidates John Hospers and Theodora Nathan. MacBride’s vote for Nathan was the first electoral vote cast for a woman in U.S. history. MacBride became the Libertarian candidate for President in the 1976 election. |
| 1976 | 1 | Washington Elector Mike Padden, pledged for Republicans Gerald Ford and Bob Dole, cast his presidential electoral vote for Ronald Reagan, who had challenged Ford for the Republican nomination. He cast his vice presidential vote, as pledged, for Dole. |
| 1984 | — | In Illinois, the electors, pledged to Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, conducted their vote in a secret ballot. When the electors voted for Vice President, one of the votes was for Geraldine Ferraro, the Democratic nominee. After several minutes of confusion, a second ballot was taken. Bush won unanimously in this ballot, and it was this ballot that was reported to Congress. |
| 1988 | 1 | West Virginia Elector Margaret Leach, pledged for Democrats Michael Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen, instead cast her votes for the candidates in the reverse of their positions on the national ticket; her presidential vote went to Bentsen and her vice presidential vote to Dukakis. |
| 2000 | 1 | Washington, D.C. Elector Barbara Lett-Simmons, pledged for Democrats Al Gore and Joe Lieberman, cast no electoral votes as a protest of Washington D.C.’s lack of representation in Congress, which she described as the federal district’s “colonial status”.[4] |
| 2004 | 1 |
A Minnesota elector, pledged for Democrats John Kerry and John Edwards, cast his or her presidential vote for John Ewards [sic],[5] rather than Kerry, presumably by accident.[6] (All of Minnesota’s electors cast their vice presidential ballots for John Edwards.) Minnesota’s electors cast secret ballots, so unless one of the electors claims responsibility, it is unlikely that the identity of the faithless elector will ever be known. As a result of this incident, Minnesota law was amended to provide for public balloting of the electors’ votes and invalidation of a vote cast for someone other than the candidate to whom the elector is pledged.[7]
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Whistler Blowers, Insiders
Just running my usual fact check here. Despite the lack of regulation on the actual electoral college, it has been and continues to be that the college has voted in conjunction with the popular vote for each state they represent. As such, no state has ever given all of it’s votes to a candidate who did not win the popular vote in that state. There have been, as noted above, irregularities involving various individuals, but the irregularities have never affected an actual election. That said, there have been four presidents elected who won by electoral vote and not the popular vote [overall of the entire USA]. They are John Q. Adams, Rutherford Hayes, Benjamin Harrison and George W. Bush. Most folks don’t understand the electoral system and can be confused by it when things like this happen. So let me simply the process for you:
State A – votes: 50,000 Bush / 49,000 Gore – Bush wins gets 10 Electorals
State B – votes: 20,000 Bush / 19,000 Gore – Bush wins gets 5 electorals
State C – votes: 90,000 Bush / 95,000 Gore – Gore wins gets 14 electorals
Bush wins 2 states = 15 electorals votes…becomes president
Gore wins 1 state = 12 electorals …loses.
Bush has 160,000 popular vote total
Gore has 163,000 popular vote total
The confusion comes into play because some states, due to population are awarded more electoral votes. Votes are based on the number of US Representatives a state has. However, it is not unusual for less than 50% of a state’s population to bother voting. So the discrepancies occur due to people not voting…not that the electoral system somehow cheats.
But each state awards its electoral votes in whole, to whomever wins that state’s popular vote. If only 35% of the registered citizens show up to vote, that does not lower the amount of electoral votes that state gets to cast, nor should it. Those electoral votes are intended to represent the whole of a state’s population.
Why do we use an electoral system? Well to solve problems like with Hurricane Sandy. Lots of people couldn’t get to vote. If a disaster should prohibit half a state’s population, let’s say Florida for instance who carries 29 electoral votes from voting, the lack of popular vote could cost a candidate an election. Popular vote can be upset by many many factors. But by ensuring the entire state is fully represented by an electoral system, that state gets a say in the election based on how many citizens it has…not by how many people bother to go vote in such literal terms. In simpler terms if Florida only has ten people show up at the polls, it, as a whole is still ranking 29 votes for president.
If you don’t want your states electoral votes going to the wrong candidate…GET UP AND GO VOTE. Nobody stops you from voting.
Hope that clarifies some of how the system works and assures you no one cheated. Obama won both the electoral AND the popular vote.