Each state’s political parties choose their own slate of potential electors.Who is chosen to be an elector, how, and when varies by state. The electoral college has been described as a workaround because the framers were having trouble figuring out how to balance all of the various needs. In the end, they decided to create a system where each state was allotted a certain number of electors based on the state’s population. Whichever when is green beer day candidate won the popular vote within the state would then win the state’s points. “Most are strong party loyalists, but they may have issues with their party’s candidate or they may simply wish to use the opportunity as a platform for a pet issue. Of course, very few choose to go rogue and I expect we will see few faithless electors this year—certainly not enough to change the results of the election,” Alexander said.
In modern times, with electors usually committed to vote for a party candidate in advance, electors that vote against the popular vote in their state are called faithless electors, and occurrences are rare. The Twelfth Amendment—proposed in 1803 and ratified in 1804—changed that original process, requiring electors to separate their votes and denote who they voted for as President and Vice President. See Electoral College and Indecisive Elections for more information. Suppose you are a member of the Electoral College on the Democratic side.
Candidates for electors are nominated by state political parties in the months prior to Election Day. In some states, such as Indiana, the electors are nominated in primaries, the same way other candidates are nominated. In other states, such as Oklahoma, Virginia, and North Carolina, electors are nominated in party conventions. In Pennsylvania, the campaign committee of each candidate names their candidates for elector . In some states, high-ranking and/or well-known state officials up to and including governors often serve as electors whenever possible .
The number of representatives is decided based on the state’s population. In the South, around 40% of the population was enslaved and didn’t have the right to vote or be represented in Congress. But Southern states still wanted them to be counted in their population so that they would be allotted more representatives in Congress. However, Northern delegates felt it would give the South an unfair advantage.
Supreme Court upheld these state laws in its 1952 ruling Ray v. Blair. In 2020, the Supreme Court also ruled in Chiafalo v. Washington that states are free to enforce laws that bind electors to voting for the winner of the popular vote in their state. If no nominee wins in the first round, the convention is considered “brokered.” The pledged delegates may choose any candidate in later rounds of voting. But if no candidate gets the majority of a party’s delegates during the primaries and caucuses, convention delegates choose the nominee. When the primaries and caucuses are over, most political parties hold a national convention.
An action by the House of Representatives to accuse the president, vice president, or other civil officers of the United States of committing “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” An office created in 1947 to coordinate the president’s foreign and military policy advisers. Its formal members are the president, vice president, secretary of state, and secretary of defense, and it is managed by the president’s national security assistant. A system of government in which citizens elect representatives, or leaders, to make decisions about the laws for all the people.
As history would show, the compromise did lend tremendous power to the South, both in Congress and in selecting the president. For example, the contested 1876 election was settled by the House giving Rutherford B Hayes the presidency with the agreement that he would pull federal military forces out of the South. This move signaled the end of the Reconstruction and allowed Jim Crow laws, which codified racism, to take hold. More than two-thirds of the 90 deviant presidential votes cast were for another candidate due to the death of the nominee.
Three voted for former Secretary of State and Republican Colin Powell, while a fourth cast a ballot for a Native American elder named Faith Spotted Eagle. The contested 1876 Presidential election brought Senators, and the electoral certificates under investigation, into the House Chamber. Find similar words to faithless-elector using the buttons below. Barbara Lett-Simmons, District of Columbia abstained from voting because she was unhappy with the lack of congressional representation for D.C. Wanted an alternative to candidate John F. Kennedy, while avoiding voting for candidate Nixon. Anyone who meets these requirements can declare their candidacy for president.