Last May, the Washington State Supreme Court ruled that the state had the power to impose a $1,000 fine on its four faithless electors, on the ground that the Constitution gives the states total authority to decide how to appoint their electors. During a time when the thirteen states were more autonomous and the federal government didn't have as much power as it does today, the founding fathers wanted to offset the chance that a single populous state would put forth a "favorite" candidate that would exclusively represent their home state and disregard the needs of the whole country. By the late 1940s, it’s become a common view that the Electoral College is key to protecting the “southern way of life.” In the end, at the moment at which the United States comes closest to adopting a national popular vote, which is in 1969-70, a constitutional amendment passes the House by an 82 percent vote, but when it gets to the Senate it is defeated by a filibuster by southern segregationist senators. Whatever their original purpose, they now are not intended to exercise any judgment different from that of the people who elected them.

Kyle Sammin is a lawyer from Pennsylvania, a senior contributor to The Federalist, and the co-host of the, The Supreme Court Just Confirmed The Electoral College Is Here To Stay. This has only happened twice in the nation's history. This article has not been reviewed by Odyssey HQ and solely reflects the ideas and opinions of the creator. Each party candidate on the presidential ballot puts forth a slate of electors who are generally chosen at the party's state convention. Is that a modern problem?
That feature is thought of as undemocratic; and it deforms election campaigns. Excerpt from “Higher Education,” by Derek Bok, All Content ©1996-2020 Harvard Magazine Inc.All right reserved In the Electoral College, Trump was granted 306 votes to Clinton's 232. As we all know if we looked at the ballot, voters do not vote for a candidate running for President. Chiafalo will disappoint those who have been desperately trying for years to get around the Electoral College without amending the Constitution. And electors (or at any rate, almost all of them) rapidly settled into that non-discretionary role.”. "Grey's Anatomy" is FINALLY coming back on TV for season 19 and it's extremely exciting. It’s almost as if we believe that we, the people, should be voting directly for the president — the only official whose job it is to represent all of us equally, wherever we live. After the Civil War, after a period of contestation and Reconstruction, white supremacist governments returned to power in the South, and they disenfranchised African Americans who had been voting and wielding some political power. At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, they had a lot of trouble figuring out how to choose the president. According to the data set assembled by Harvard Law School scholars, black and Latinx people are overrepresented in Massachusetts’ criminal caseload compared to their population in the state. The two states that do not follow the traditional model are Maine and Nebraska who award two electoral votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote and receive another vote for each congressional district they win.

No one ever understood the words of the Twenty-Third Amendment to mean anything but that those three electors would represent the voters of the federal district, and in practice, they always have, without exception. In fact, Kagan writes, “our whole experience as a Nation points in the opposite direction … Electors have only rarely exercised discretion in casting their ballots for President.
Once a state appoints an elector, the court said, its power over that elector ends.


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