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this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2024
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Hey so... Being non American, I only learned about the electoral college during the last election, or was it in 2016? I forget.
What happens if the electors get corrupt and decide to vote Trump against the majority of the population?
And doesn't that mean that a president can be elected against the will of the majority?
I want to say every republican president since W in 2004 (and I think even that is somewhat questionable?) has lost the popular vote and only won because of gerrymandering and the electoral college. We already are electing presidents against the will of the majority.
As for electors going rogue? Welcome to the US government (and a shocking other number of governments but...) where basically every bit of our constitution depends on good faith actors.
When you think about it, democracy at it's core depends on good faith actors. Democracy IS good faith
That's not entirely true. Many states make it a crime for electors not to vote for the state's winner.
After the fact, but it doesn't prevent them from doing it in the first place. The federal government doesn't care, they're just handed the electoral votes from the states and go with it.
W lost the popular vote in 2000 but won it in 2004.
Gerrymandering doesn't apply to statewide races like the electoral college.
However it does affect state legislatures and they're the ones that make election laws.
Yes. Yes it does.
Due to the way the Electoral College works (even when not being undermined by bad-faith actors) it is possible for a candidate to win the popular vote (i.e., get more raw votes than his opponent) and yet end up with fewer Electoral College votes thereby losing the election. This has happened many times, and I believe no recent Republican president has won the popular vote with the exception of Bush Jr.'s second run.
So the term for this is "faithless elector" and the answer is, it depends.
For some states if an elector promises to vote for X, and then they vote for Y, they are immediately replaced and their vote does not count. In other states the vote stands as is.
Most commonly a faithless elector isn't used to vote for one of the major parties, but for a third party or someone who didn't run for president. For example if Trump won a given state, but an elector refused to vote for Trump, they will likely vote for another Republican.
The EC isn't really that complicated. It means that the election is not settled by a national popular vote, but rather with the result of a weighted average of 50 State elections + Washington, DC. This weighted average is based on the number of seats each state has in the House (which is roughly proportional) plus the Senate (where each State has two seats). The net result is that the weighted average overweights smaller states.
The way it works now, each campaign pre-selects a slate of electors who would get to vote in the EC if their candidate wins that state. So the likelihood that an elector casts a different vote is slim, because they are supporters of the candidate who won the election.
Absolutely, and it has happened twice since 2000. Both times the Republican won the EC while losing the popular vote. It happened because they did better in the smaller states than the competition did, and we already established the EC purposely overweights smaller states.
It all works this way because, historically, there was no requirement that EC slates be chosen by popular vote at all. The State Legislatures themselves picked who they would send to the EC. And while they were sent with a directive on who to vote for, they didn't have to comply, and there were Presidential elections that weren't decided until the EC actually made their votes, as any one who has watched Hamilton knows. But over the years, several states decided to have the EC slates chosen by popular vote, until it became the norm.
So one possible problem is that because of this vestigial alignment with the will of the Legislature, the Legislature has the last word on the EC slates, and had the power to totally ignore the election if it wants. State Legislatures haven't done this to date. It hasn't been done since 1960 in Hawaii, when there were serious irregularities with the vote, acknowledged by both parties, and the Legislature acted to make sure they got the result right, by certifying both slates and then withdrawing the one that lost after the recounts.
(Fun fact for that 1960 election: the losing candidate was Nixon, who happened to be VP at the time, and had the job to preside over the counting of his loss in HI even though technically both slates of votes were sent by HI.)
You missed an important detail: most states give all their electoral votes to whoever won that state, so for example whoever gets 51% of the votes in Texas gets 100% Texas's electoral votes. The result is that most states' electoral votes are easily predicted by post elections, leading presidential candidates to focus on a handful of "swing" states where the outcome of that state's election is in question. Another result is that it suppresses voter turnout in non-swing states because people their feel like the outcome of their state's election is predetermined.
Thank you for this detailed response.
I find it incredible that it's not really the people who vote for their leader but some electors that, from my understanding, aren't necessarily elected by the people?
The original concept was that the electors were chosen by the State Legislature. So not directly via popular vote, but indirectly by a body that was elected by a popular vote, so is still accountable to the public.
It is the case that electors are required to vote for the nominee that they pledged to vote for. If you pledged to vote A as an elector you are obligated to vote A. However, as I understand from skimming CHIAFALO ET AL. v. WASHINGTON (2019), it is on pain of penalty...
There might be more to it but I don't have time to read it all.
Also, it doesn't really matter what the rules say. The current right wing majority of the SCOTUS doesn't give a flying fuck about laws, rules, or precedents if they don't support their views so who the fuck knows.
It's called a "faithless elector" and what happens depends on the law of the state the elector is representing. Some states void the vote without penalty, some void it with some penalty, some allow the vote but with penalty, some allow the vote with no penalty, and some have no law at all (which seems like no difference from allowing with no penalty).
It's entirely conceivable that enough faithless electors from states that do not void the vote could swing an election, though there's never been enough to do so before.
AFAIK the Electoral College can ignore their constituents.
However this should look very bad on the specific members ignoring their constituents.
Bad enough to prompt them to not be reelected.
Some states have laws to force a correct EC vote according to the popular vote. Not all do
The College is structured in a way that allows a candidate to win against the majority of the population, without even needing individual electors to be corrupt. But yes—corrupt electors can also switch their votes independently; there are laws penalizing them for doing so, but their votes are still counted.