In a presidential election, because it's actually an election for a slate of pledged electors under the banner of a given party rather than an actual direct vote for a candidate, there's no constitutional barriers to this The GOP can just say all Trump votes are now Pence votes
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Replying to @arthur_affect @boltmeyer
What exactly does it mean to be a pledged elector (AIUI different states have different degrees of enforcement, but it's not clear to me who can, except in the case of the nominee actually dying, release them from it)
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Replying to @Random832 @boltmeyer
Yeah the definition of a pledged elector is you're a party operative -- officially an elected official of the party, you "run for election" on the actual ballot regular people get in November -- and you sign a contract to vote for who the party tells you to
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The way the pledges are constructed there is no way to ever be "released from your pledge" and no circumstance under which the party tells you it's okay to just use your own judgment Both parties specifically tell you if the nominee dies they'll tell you who the new one is
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Replying to @arthur_affect @boltmeyer
Er, whether it's a 'release' or a substitution, my question was *does the party have that authority*? Is the party, in fact, the er, counterparty to the pledge, rather than the state?
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[and in that case what happens to electors who insist on voting for Trump anyway?]
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Replying to @Random832 @boltmeyer
Oh yeah that's a bigger and deeper question, about faithless electors generally, that hits right at the core of our constitutional order It's like asking what happens if the Queen decides to dismiss Parliament and say she's going to start ruling the country directly again
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Officially, the Constitution itself says the electors have the absolute authority to pick the President, and the "pledges" don't exist in the Constitution at all What we're doing right now is this very awkward compromise where the states can say faithless votes are "illegal"
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But in a bunch of states they just say it's "illegal" without any named penalty, and in a bunch of other states it's "illegal" as in you have to pay a fine, and in some states it actually says you are "required" (by the state government) to change your vote
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They just had a big court case about this, Chiafolo v. Washington, about faithless electors in the 2016 election Democratic electors who wanted to protest-vote against Hillary and for John Kasich or Colin Powell for some godforsaken reason
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According to what I'm reading, they wanted to protest that the 12th Amendment of the Constitution implicitly grants electors the right to vote any way they want and charging a monetary fine for faithless voting is a violation of their constitutional privilege
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Lawrence Lessig, who wants to officially abolish the Electoral College, sponsored their court case as a chess move to eliminate the pledged-elector system and just honestly have a true popular vote It didn't work though
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SCOTUS ruled unanimously that state governments enforcing pledged electors via monetary fines is totally constitutional, and I guess implicitly thinks this is good enough for keeping presidential elections democratic
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