Posted on 07/06/2020 8:39:06 AM PDT by Fawn
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court has ruled unanimously that states can require presidential electors to back their states’ popular vote winner in the Electoral College.
The ruling, just under four months before the 2020 election, leaves in place laws in 32 states and the District of Columbia that bind electors to vote for the popular-vote winner, and electors almost always do so anyway.
So-called faithless electors have not been critical to the outcome of a presidential election, but that could change in a race decided by just a few electoral votes. It takes 270 electoral votes to win the presidency.
(Excerpt) Read more at wptv.com ...
Yes.
Not what the ruling said
See the post above this one. This AP story is just dead wrong
This is simply about each single state and only the vote compact for each state alone meaning that if a national party candidate carries said state the electors vote the will of the state then certified by the state.
For the record, Elena Kagan wrote the majority opinion. Justices Roberts, Alito, Kavanaugh, Sotomayor, Bader-Ginsburg, and Breyer concurred with her ruling. Justice Thomas wrote a separate concurring opinion that Justice Gorsuch joined. But the final vote was 9-0.
Short-sighted for any small state to sign on to this
Sign on to...the Constitution?
With all due respect, your post contradicts itself. They determined that the Electors are to be chosen to vote for a certain candidate by statute under their constitutional authority. You can’t separate that as two different things based on their determination of how the Electors are chosen.
No contradiction. As an analogy, the Constitution gives the President the power to appoint Federal judges (subject to consent of the Senate). The Constitution gives no power to the President to control how those judges rule on cases once they are appointed to their positions.
In similar vein, the power to select electors belongs to the state legislatures. They all choose to do so via a popular vote of some form, a t
statewide vote for the whole slate in 48 states, and a vote by congressional district in 2 states. There is no requirement that a popular vote be held at all. They could flip a coin, they could use the latest weather forecast, they could award electors based on which movie wins best picture at the next oscars, etc. Once they have selected the electors, by whatever method, what they cannot do is tell the electors who to vote for.
At least that’s true if we’re trying to adhere to the original intent of our Constitution. The electors were intended to be independent actors who voted for Presidential candidates based on the merits of the candidate rather than on political or factional affiliations. Obviously that didn’t really work out so well as politics and factionalism entered the process during our third election for POTUS and has continued ever since. That doesn’t change the fact that the electors were intended to be and still are independent actors.
Even with this ruling, I’m not sure a faithless elector’s vote would be invalidated. The SCOTUS ruling held that state laws requiring electors to vote in a certain way are constitutional. That means a state can punish a faithless elector with fines or imprisonment, but I’m not at all sure that their vote can be overridden. At least there’s no Constitutional provision for doing so. That would likely require a further ruling by the SCOTUS.
In any event this case is mainly academic— faithless electors are rare and probably will never change an election result. The real point is to cast aspersions on the whole electoral college system and pave the way for the popular vote compact. This ruling helps along that path, even though I’ve heard many people claim it makes the popular vote compact more difficult. The ruling held that laws compelling the elector to vote for a certain candidate are constitutional. It does not say that ONLY laws compelling an elector to vote for the popular vote winner in the elector’s state are constitutional. Laws compelling the elector to vote for a candidate other than the popular vote winner of the state, such as laws compelling him/her to vote for the national popular vote winner would likewise pass muster.
seems that is a disenfranchisement issue there since it renders a particular states votes irrelevant, specifically flyover country. It makes the three largest states more equal than others.
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