Supreme Court BANS Faithless Electors…………?

Hello Internet. Time for a quick update regarding everyone's favorite voting system: The Electoral College. America's… idiosyncratic method of picking her president. It's been unchanged (mostly) for centuries, but this video exists because, in July 2020, there was some Supreme Court popcorn about faithless electors, one of the most controversial mechanisms of the system.

Lightning quick Electoral College recap. The states get votes for president proportional-ish to their populations. For most citizens, how many votes their state gets is all they need to know. But for you watching this video, you want to go down a level below to know what the deal is with faithless electors, and the NaPoVoInterCo plan, and this new ruling.

So the level below is that the state votes aren't really votes. They're people. After the national election, a state doesn't cast their number of votes, but rather appoints that number of people to vote for president in their capital, and it's all of these people in their respective state capitols who are the electors. And it's their votes that truly decide the president.

Side Note: At this point, everyone always asks, "Who are these people?" And the answer is they're chosen in advance by the parties and they're usually local party officials. Each party picks their own group of electors, and so the national election is really a way each state decides which of the pre-approved groups will do the real voting for president.

Anyway, here's where faithless electors come in. These electors are supposed to vote for the official candidate of the party that picked them. But they don't have to. Back in the 1700s, the idea was that by the time all the electors got together, there was going to be a lot more they could know about the candidates and the current political situation than voters back home could ever have known.

Remember, communication at the time wasn't with smartphones or with telegraphs, but with letters carried by a dude on a horse. So if you wanted to be up-to-date on politics, you had to be in the capital where it was happening. Which is why the electors had to meet in person. And also why it took place weeks later. Because there were no trains either.

All this is to say that if you were an elector in 1796, by the time you got to the capital and caught up on the news, there might be good reasons you'd want to switch your vote and become a faithless elector. Though it turned out over the centuries this rarely happened, and never in enough numbers to change the president, but the possibility of a post-national-election, pre-inauguration presidential switch has always been present, either as a final gambit from the losing side, or because a disagreeing faction on the winning side was glad to have won, but not glad about the candidate they won with and so would like to swap.

Either of these faithless coups would, in modern times, doubtless cause citizen outrage, but would nonetheless be a-okay with the Electoral College rules. That's faithless electors. Which, if you believe most news headlines, the Supreme Court has just banned. But of course, not exactly. In their 2020 decision, the Court ruled states may pass laws preventing faithless electors. And that's it.

The Supreme Court herself hasn't prevented anything. In fact, this case is a bit of a nothing burger. A unanimous decision that states can tell their electors what to do. Based on this line in the Constitution, the Court interpreted as "conveying the broadest power of determination" over electors and their actions. That interpretation is not from the 2020 case, by the way, but from an 1892 case. The Court just reaffirmed it.

So the states telling their electors what to do is nothing new. Which is why, at the time of the 2020 Court decision, 32 states already had laws preventing faithless electors. This modern decision is just the Supreme Court giving a casual thumbs up.

As for the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact Plan (explained here), this ruling has no strong feelings one way or the other. It's entirely about binding electors to their party, and not at all about how a state picks which group of electors to send, which is the whole basis of the NaPoVoInterCo plan, and will yield plenty more Supreme Court popcorn if it ever gets enacted.

But for now, absolutely nothing has changed. [soft chill music]