2016 Postmortem

“Presidential Electors are theoretically free to vote as their consciences dictate, something the founders anticipated Electors would indeed do under Hamilton’s Electoral College invention,” Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, told us via email.

Tribe said the constitutionality of imposing a fine on a “faithless elector” is “open to doubt, and it is even more doubtful that a court would compel any Elector to be ‘faithful’ to the State’s winner-take-all outcome. Nor is it likely that the Vice President, who presides over the process of opening the Electors’ ballots and counting the votes cast by the 538 Electors, would feel free to ‘correct’ a faithless Elector’s vote. So, in theory, if enough Electors pledged to Mr. Trump decline to make him President-elect and vote instead for Secretary Clinton, she would become the President-elect and would be the 45th President upon taking the Oath of Office on January 20, 2017.”

But Tribe said such a scenario is highly unlikely as a matter of practice, in part because it would likely be opposed by President Obama and Clinton herself.