Members of the Electoral College are chosen by state legislatures, according to the U.S. Constitution. Since 1836 (with the exception of South Carolina), voters, rather than state legislatures, have selected party-designated slates of electors who are pledged to support their party’s nominee to represent the plurality of voters in the state. In all states but two (Maine and Nebraska), the party of the plurality vote-winner gains 100 percent of the electors voting for the state. In Maine and Nebraska, electors are assigned on the basis of the plurality of votes for each House district, with the additional two electors being assigned on the basis of the statewide popular vote.
In some instances, electors have cast a ballot for someone other than the candidate to whom they were pledged when the Electoral College convened in December. A faithless elector is an elector who fails to support the party’s candidate when the Electoral College meets. While faithless electors are rare, political observers are concerned about them nonetheless. After all, presidential elections are already an indirect process. Citizens (often unwittingly) cast their votes for a slate of unnamed electors who merely promise to reflect their wishes during the real election, a month later. If electors vote according to their own personal whims, voter decisions on Election Day are essentially meaningless.
While it is theoretically possible for a faithless elector to alter the outcome of a presidential election, this has never happened. In large part, this is because electors are selected by state political parties, and so they have a strong incentive to support their party’s ticket. When electors are faithless, it is often to support a rival candidate from their own political party, although there are also notable instances of defections in support of a specific political policy (for example, in three twentieth-century cases, electors defected to support a pro-segregation candidate).
Recent documented instances of faithless electors include the following:
•2004 (an unknown Minnesota elector for John Kerry voted instead for his running mate, John Edwards)
•2000 (a DC elector for Al Gore cast a blank ballot)
•1988 (a West Virginia elector for Michael Dukakis voted instead for his running mate, Lloyd Bentsen)
•1976 (a Washington elector for Gerald Ford voted instead for Ronald Reagan, who had lost to Ford in the Republican primary)
•1972 (a Virginia elector for Nixon voted instead for a Libertarian)
•1968 (a North Carolina elector for Nixon voted instead for George Wallace, the pro-segregation candidate from the American Independent Party)
•1960 (an Oklahoma elector for Nixon voted instead for Harry Byrd Sr., a pro-segregation senator from Virginia)
•1956 (an Alabama elector for Adlai Stevenson voted instead for an Alabama judge)
•1948 (a Tennessee elector for Truman voted instead for Strom Thurmond, who had defected from the Democratic Party to run on the States’ Rights ticket on a pro-segregation platform)
Currently, twenty-six states (as well as the District of Columbia) require that electors vote for the candidate to whom they pledged their support (although some exceptions are made when that candidate is deceased by the time the electoral vote is to be cast). However, twenty-four states have no such requirement. Even when electors are required to vote for the candidate to whom they have pledged, few states have penalties for ignoring the requirement: three states (North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Washington) impose a monetary fine; two (New Mexico and South Carolina) subject faithless electors to criminal prosecution; and Utah automatically removes and replaces electors who fail to uphold their pledge.
The Green Papers. “2000 Electors for President and Vice President of the United States.” July 6, 2004 http://www.thegreenpapers.com/G00/Electors.html. Accessed October 15, 2015.
Federal Employees. See Civil Service Reform