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FAITHLESS ELECTORS

© John S. Cooper

We will know on election night in November, or early the next morning, who will be our next President. But in reality, that is not decided until another election in December. That is when the Electoral College meets, and elects the next President of the United States. In November, we are not electing a President; we are electing the Electors who will elect the next President. (For more details on our system of electing the President and Vice President of the United States, see my article “The Electoral College: How It Works” which was published on November 12, 1999.)

When the Founding Fathers drafted the Constitution, they intended that the Electors should meet and calmly and objectively discuss who should be elected President. They had no intention of Electors deciding their vote in advance, much less running for the position based on how they would vote. They had not only the right, but also the duty to vote as they deemed best for the people. This system has not changed; it is still the system we use today.

The only change in the system is that today, we use a winner-take-all method. Each candidate has candidates for Elector equal to the number of electoral votes to which that state is entitled. Whichever candidate gets the largest number of popular votes wins all of that state’s electoral votes. Such has not always been the case.

In the early days of our Constitution, Electors were chosen by the state legislatures. This led to political deals and a split of the state’s electoral votes in many cases. In some states, a combination of selection by the legislature and popular vote decided the choice of Electors, causing more splits in the state’s electoral votes. The use of voting machines and straight ticket voting at the beginning of this century led to the decline in split electoral votes.

There has been one other cause of split electoral votes throughout our history. That is the “faithless Elector.” In several elections, an Elector pledged to a given candidate has changed his vote, and cast it for a different candidate. It has never made the difference in the outcome of an election, but there have been elections close enough where it could have done so.

The first “faithless Elector” was in our third election, in 1796. A Federalist Elector voted for Democratic-Republican Jefferson instead of Federalist Adams. Although three supposedly Democratic-Republican Electors voted for Adams, there is some disagreement about their being the first “faithless Electors.” They were close friends of John Adams and party lines were not clearly drawn.

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