[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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Like, the electors could all meet in a room and just randomly decide they want Kanye West to be the President, and they could theoretically do it, and maybe they'd all lose their houses and even go to prison afterwards, but constitutionally we'd still have President Kanye West
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That's kind of fucked up I guess it matters what the states mean that say you are "required" to take the faithless vote back really mean by "required" What if you just put your hands behind your back and say you're absolutely not changing it
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(It's that whole dorm-room anarchist argument that "all power is ultimately enforced through the barrel of a gun", like are they going to have a bailiff grab your arm and physically make you check the box in order to save American democracy)
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