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I believe in Maine this election, 3 of the electoral votes went to Biden but the 4th went to Trump. Not sure how that will play out in the end but that's how it was reported on Fox Business Tuesday night.
Once the counting is finally over, once the lawsuits are finally over, then we get to worry about faithless electors.
Here’s a scenario: Biden ends up winning 270-268. One faithless elector casts his ballot for Trump and it is now 269-269, Which would likely mean a Trump win due to House voting by state.
Of course the Biden team knows this, so in order to be safe from faithless electors, they need a bigger win than 270-268. Or they need to work on coercing Republican electors to switch too.
I don’t think most people know about faithless electors since they have never flipped an election before. This would be yet another lawsuit going before the Supreme Court. That would be a tough call since the Constitution doesn’t fully address the issue that electors must vote based on the popular vote.
The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the states who decided to force their electors to follow the popular vote. But what about the states that don’t have this law on their books?
The framers of the Constitution originally designated delegates to the EC to vote according to districts within the state so that states would split their electoral votes making them roughly proportional to the candidates support.
That system changed in the 1800s, after Thomas Jefferson realized he would have a better chance of winning if the delegates at his own home state voted as a block rather than by district and he convinced them to do so. Quickly other state officials recognized that the "winner take all" system would increase the chances of their own preferred candidate winning.
Thus our non-proportional system was born.
This so horrified James Madison and Alexander Hamilton that both wanted Constitutional amendments to switch the system back.
It took another hit in 1929 when the nation's demographics showed a strong movement to the cities which were controlled by Democrats. So Republicans in control of the House of Representative refused to reapportion representation after the census.
Instead of committing the number of representatives to grow along with the population, Congress kept the size of the house at 435 which gave a huge advantage in the electoral college to the smaller states as each state gets the number of votes equal to the number of US senators and representatives.
This is how we ended up with an EC that permits a minority to rule over the majority.
Once the counting is finally over, once the lawsuits are finally over, then we get to worry about faithless electors.
Here’s a scenario: Biden ends up winning 270-268. One faithless elector casts his ballot for Trump and it is now 269-269, Which would likely mean a Trump win due to House voting by state.
Of course the Biden team knows this, so in order to be safe from faithless electors, they need a bigger win than 270-268. Or they need to work on coercing Republican electors to switch too.
I don’t think most people know about faithless electors since they have never flipped an election before. This would be yet another lawsuit going before the Supreme Court. That would be a tough call since the Constitution doesn’t fully address the issue that electors must vote based on the popular vote.
The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the states who decided to force their electors to follow the popular vote. But what about the states that don’t have this law on their books?
If the EC doesn’t pick someone the House of Representatives votes.
Nancy Pelosi has already said they’ll be ready to do so.
If Biden wins NV; he wins.
If it goes to the House of Representatives; he wins.
there is a right to anonymity for this unfaithful voter, because he will need it if he wants to continue living.
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Faithless Electors- The next crisis
