1. The faithless-elector decision is, its legal merits aside, a healthy development for the fall elections. States can, of course, allow faithless electors, but long tradition has taught Americans & their candidates to assume that the winner of a state's vote gets its electors.
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8. There is much to be said for the Court's view that post-1787 tradition is at least partly incorporated in the electoral college by the passage of the Twelfth Amendment in 1804pic.twitter.com/skgBgNNMSH
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9. Where the Court is on more unsettled ground is the remedy - i.e., what states can do to enforce the ban on faithless electors. But the Constitution being silent on that, the combination of delegation to state legislatures w/residual state power carries some weight.
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10. "Electors contend that elector discretion is needed to deal with the possibility that a future presidential candidate will die between Election Day and the Electoral College vote....We do not dismiss how much turmoil such an event could cause." That happened in 1872.
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11. As I read the opinions, Thomas & Gorsuch, by vesting all residual authority over electors in the state legislature, would give legislatures the power to follow, say, the national popular vote compact. Kagan's Art II analysis should, too, but...
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12. ...Kagan's opinion has some escape hatches talking about tradition, the power of the popular vote, other clauses in the Constitution. Its logic makes the state legislatures supreme, but maybe not unchecked:pic.twitter.com/SnJGM8IPHp
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Related, maybe the strongest case for reforming the EC isn't faithless electors or even the popular vote it's that it's totally legal for another state to go the SC route (more likely divide by district a la NE/ME) and cause said hypothetical national uproar
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As with many things, we could improve the current system but we could never pass any improvements into law bc there would be holdout demands to instead blow the whole thing up, go national popular vote.
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