Most of this article comes from Stickypedia though I did a fair bit of cross checking. We have just witnessed a US Presidential election and it was all about Electoral College votes. 539 are up for grabs hence the need to get 270 or more for victory.
I had an inkling that an electoral college would mean all 500 odd of them getting together and having a vote. How wrong can you be. They don’t even take one step out of their own state.
When they wrote the Constitution they set the rules for a Presidential election. They came up with the Electoral College idea as described in Article 2 of the Constitution. Each state is allocated number of electors. It is essentially the number of senators plus the number of congressmen. Each state gets two senators and at least one congressman, the actual number of congressmen being determined by the population size. Six states and DC have only 3 electors, California has 54.
Although having an electoral college offsets to some degree the bigger states swamping the smaller ones, it was introduced after pressure from slave states because in general having relatively small populations, they could count a slave as 3/5 of a person and increase their power, other smaller states were also in favour.
Today there are 538 electors. They are expected to vote for whichever candidate got the most votes except in Nebraska and Maine where they divide up the vote among two or three areas. These two states can have an elector for one side and another elector for the other side. The selection of these electors is something rather odd. The two main parties choose potential electors and the winning side puts forward their electors. All this is controlled by the state and they have various ways of managing it.
Washington DC had no electors until 1961 when the 23rd amendment was passed. 1964 was the first time the voters in Washington DC had a vote in a Presidential Election.
Having said that the winning side in a state will provide the electors, those electors then meet up in their State Capitals to cast their votes for the President and Vice-President. These are then mailed to Washington DC where the votes are then counted and even disputed. In the event of no candidate having a majority, a contingent election is held by both Houses to elect the President and Vice-President. We all remember that snake Mike Pence just allowing everything through when there had obviously been some massive fiddles.
Now we get to the faithless electors. This where they cast their vote for a candidate other than the one they should have chosen. This is also governed by the state’s own rules and there are 5 possibilities. There have been several court cases over the years about the legality of these processes.
- Vote voided with penalty
Oklahoma and North Carolina - Vote voided
14 states including Texas, New York and California - Vote counted with penalty
New Mexico and South Carolina - Vote Counted
17 including Florida,Virginia and Wisconsin - No law
15 states including Pennsylvania, Illinois and Georgia
It’s rather a mess with individual states deciding how to handle this, those where faithless votes are voided generally replace the elector. The real odd part is that half of the states requiring electors to be faithful have no enforcement mechanism.
It seems almost every election ever has had at least one faithless voter. Over the 59 presidential elections there have been 165 who did not cast their vote as prescribed by the state they represented.
71 of these changed their vote because their candidate died before the ballot. The rest have been down to personal preference (or prejudice), generally acting on their own. In 1836 all 23 Virginia electors acted together changing the outcome of the electoral college vote but it did not affect the overall election. In 1832 all 30 electors from Pennsylvania refused to vote for Vice Presidential candidate Martin van Buren.
In 1872 Horace Greeley, a presidential nominee, died on Nov 29 just before the December electoral college. 66 electors voted all over the place including 3 who voted for the deceased candidate. This may yet become a tactic for the Democrats.
In 2016 it was a bit of a dog’s breakfast with 10 faithless electors. Three of these electors had their votes invalidated according to the rules mentioned about.
The winner takes all solution is not always popular. Many people claim it does not align with the one person one vote theory. The United States is not the only country in the world still using an electoral college system in elections. It is also used in the subcontinent and in that hotbed of corruption Belgium for that other hotbed of corruption, the European Parliament.
The boring part is the actual voting, the electors meet in their state and produce a certificate of vote for the winning candidate and a certificate of ascertainment listing the appointed electors. Both certificates are sent to DC where the Vice President opens them in front of the Senate and Congress. This happens in the first week of January and means that Heels Up will have to declare Donald J Trump as the 47th President of the United States. For some reason the halfwit Harris was sure she was going to win. I hope it sticks in her throat.
This rigmarole is one of the few official duties of a Vice President.
So it is a bit of a hotch potch of a system. The Federal Constitution lays down the guidelines and the individual states decide how to execute it. The howls to abolish it are particularly loud when one candidate wins the electoral college vote but the other candidate wins the popular vote. You can imagine which side howls the loudest. In fact this was the case in 2016 when the Donald won the electoral college but Killary won the popular vote. My take on that is that the Democrats got the fix(es) wrong and in the wrong places. They were obviously better prepared in 2020 when the Donald was still not aware of how corrupt the swamp was and still is. This time he is better prepared.
© well_chuffed 2024
