Who are “Faithless Electors”?

A faithless elector is one who casts an electoral vote for someone other than the candidate they have pledged to elect. On 157 occasions, electors have cast their votes for president or vice president in a different manner than that prescribed by the legislature of the state they represent. Of those, 71 votes were changed because the original candidate died before the elector was able to cast a vote. Two votes were not cast at all when electors chose to abstain from casting their electoral vote for any candidate. The remaining 85 were changed by the elector's personal interest or perhaps by accident. Usually, the faithless electors act alone.

There are laws to punish faithless electors in 24 states. While no faithless elector has ever been punished, the constitutionality of state pledge laws was brought before the Supreme Court in 1952 (Ray v. Blair, 343 U.S. 214). The court upheld those laws that require electors to pledge to vote for the winning candidate, as well as remove electors who refuse to pledge. As stated in the ruling, electors are acting as a function of the state, not the federal government, and states have the right to govern their officers. The constitutionality of punishing an elector for actual faithlessness, however, has never been decided by the Supreme Court. In any event, a state may only punish a faithless elector after the fact; it has no power to change their vote.

The electoral college sucks, but what sucks even more is if you listen to the liberal media defending it even though it caused them to lose. It's a mechanism to control the people and make sure true democracy is not possible, which is why they would never abandon such a powerful tool even in the face of defeat. The idea of "deplorables" choosing their own leadership is much too frightening.

I get the republic thing but it's pretty obvious that the electoral college is set up to skew democratic elections and preserve the centers of power.

I get the republic thing but it's pretty obvious that the electoral college is set up to skew democratic elections and preserve the centers of power. Like first-past-the-post it eliminates outsider parties and makes it impossible to drain the swamp.

I get the republic thing but it's pretty obvious that the electoral college is set up to skew democratic elections and preserve the centers of power. Like first-past-the-post it eliminates outsider parties and makes it impossible to drain the swamp.

Another way to see it is the US is kinda like the European Union where countries (in the US we call them states) organize under a central authority.  People don't vote for changes in the EU.  Instead the countries submit votes, and the people vote inside of their countries.

People don't realize that the US is made up of individual countires because we have broad freedoms.