Some in Washington and others on social media are speculating that President-elect Trump is on the cusp of a tidal wave of “faithless electors” defecting from their pledges.
The notion is provocative, titillating — and has no root in reality and is nothing new.
Anti-Trump forces are advancing efforts to invalidate his election in the only venue that matters: the Electoral College. The electors of the Electoral College — the people who actually choose the next president — will gather on Dec. 19 to make their choices; choices that are supposed to represent the will of the voters of the 50 sovereign states.
When the Electoral College meets on Dec. 19th in each separate state, there may be some defectors, but that tradition is nearly as old as our republic, and Trump’s electoral majority is simply too large for a faithless-elector rebellion to cause him to lose the election.
“A faithless elector is someone who breaks their promise and votes for someone else,” said Paul Sracic, a political science professor at Youngstown University and expert on the electoral process.
“There are different ways of counting faithless electors, but using a fairly liberal definition yields 157 faithless electors throughout our history,” he said.
“While it is not that uncommon to have one faithless elector, those who oppose Trump would need 37 faithless electors to deny Trump the majority demanded by the Constitution,” said Sracic.
The most recent faithless elector occurred in Minnesota in 2004, when an anonymous elector cast a vote for John Edwards, and not John Kerry, for president.
It is not clear whether this was intentional.
On Monday, Hillary Clinton’s top adviser John Podesta said the campaign is supporting an effort by 10 electors who are demanding a request to see an intelligence briefing on foreign intervention in the presidential election.
One of those ten electors is Democrat Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s daughter.
“Trump won 306 electoral votes in the election, well above the 270 needed to defeat Hillary Clinton and claim the White House,” said Sracic, “But a group of rogue electors from Colorado and Washington — the ‘Hamilton Electors’ — is trying to persuade other electors to unite behind a Republican alternative to Trump,” he said.
Technically, electors could abandon their commitments.
“Although this is illegal in 29 states, the penalty is fairly minor, and the constitutionality of laws is in doubt,” he explained.
But there are so many barriers to electors overturning an election that it is literally impossible to imagine it happening.
Electoral votes have to be validated by each individual state’s secretary of state. Since over half of those states bound the electors by law the official is within their rights to refuse to count that vote.
State legislatures have almost total power over how electors are chosen, so if a massive wave of electors decided to break from their pledge, the state legislature could effectively choose their own slate.
Since most of the state legislatures in this country are majority Republican, that serves as a pretty good barrier against defecting electors.
