From The Hill:
Supreme Court agrees to hear ‘faithless elector’ cases
The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear a pair of cases on the issue of “faithless electors,” members of the Electoral College who choose not to support the presidential candidate picked by the voters in their state.
The move opens the potential for the Supreme Court to impose new rules for the Electoral College amid a presidential race this year.
The court granted the appeals in two cases out of Washington state and Colorado. Those cases challenge laws seeking to keep electors from going against the wishes of voters.
The case in Washington was brought by three Democratic electors who in 2016 opted not to vote for Hillary Clinton, who had won the state. Those electors instead backed Colin Powell, the former Republican secretary of State.
The Colorado lawsuit was brought by another elector who was removed after also declining to cast a vote for Clinton.
In 2016, there were a total of 10 faithless electors. Clinton lost five votes as a result, then President-elect Trump lost two and another three were invalidated by their states.
That is all you need to know about this case.
Here is why it is so important.
Just about a year ago I wrote about the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
The Compact states that the states that sign onto it will have their electors vote for the recipient of the national popular vote instead of the winner of their state.
So if all the voters in Colorado vote for the Republican but the Democrat carries the national popular vote, Colorado’s nine electoral college votes would go for the Democrat.
This is nothing but a way for high population density coastal states to force middle American swing states into ceding their electoral college power.
If the Supreme Court decided that laws prohibiting faithless electors are illegitimate, what would stop the Democrats from simply bribing and/or threatening electors into voting for their candidate?
Why bother to make anything more of a show of a campaign?
Simply let the electors know that if they vote for the Democrat, their kids “might” have a very good chance at being accepted to Harvard or Yale and then get a good six-figure make-work job at a NY or DC consulting agency or Hollywood studio, all of which are run by Democrat donors?
That campaign contribution money would go from a war chest to a mountain of payola overnight.
And once the Democrats secure the Presidency forever by way of simply needing to corrupt 538 people (270 to win but enough to vote for the other guy to maintain the pretense of fairness) are they really going to investigate the corruption that put them in power.
Anybody who refuses the bribe, well… Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself.
This is why this case is the most important one in decades, if not since Marbury, because it will decide if the Democrats get the green light to steal every presidential election by skipping the whole electoral process and just corrupt the college voters.
Colorado has said that their voters don’t matter. This allows the voters in other states to essentially vote multiple times: once to decide the elector from their own state and again in each state that has this Popular vote compact.
I had learned, long ago, that the electors were the final safeguard, and could choose to vote against their state if in their judgment the candidate was simply unacceptable.
I realize that poses dangers. But it also means, for instance, that “popular national vote pact” state electors could in cast votes in accord with their states’ wishes, not California’s.
So I’m a little reluctant to get rid of that ability.
The pact mandates that they become faithless to their electors and faithfully to California. Colorado’s electors would have to vote for the national popular candidate and not the winner of the popular vote in Colorado if it was the other candidate by law. They don’t get a choice.
Unless they chose to break that state law and live with the consequences, as I understand it. (Which I may not.)
The “popular vote” thing makes this rather complicated.
The Constitution says that Electors are appointed in each state in such manner as the state legislature may direct. It gives no power over the electors, once they are appointed. So the “faithless elector” notion is a made up idea not supported by the Constitution, which clearly leaves each elector’s vote up to the discretion of the elector. And this is clearly the original intent as shown by the debates on the topic. In practice this has always been rare, but it has occurred occasionally for many years and has never been an issue that I can recall.
It’s true that parties could try to pressure electors to cast a vote different from what they stood for. That pressure was brought to bear, in a big way, in 2016. It didn’t work, and the fact that Hillary lost more electoral votes than Trump did is a nice bit of Schadenfreude.
The “popular vote” compact is unconstitutional because states cannot join in compacts without approval of Congress (article 1 section 10). But if there were such approval, then presumably the states could appoint electors by this new rule. Still, those electors would be no more constrained than they are now.