Timeline for In the United States government, has there been cases that electoral colleges don't vote for the candidate the majority of their state voted for?
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12 events
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| Apr 6 at 18:05 | comment | added | Michael Hardy | @T.E.D. The Constitution of the United States says explicitly that this is to be decided by state legislatures. | |
| Apr 6 at 1:43 | comment | added | T.E.D.♦ | @MichaelHardy - It up to the states. How the state decides things politically is mostly their business. Yeah, that probably means its legislature, but its not inconceivable for a state to have provisions in its constitution about this, or to pass laws deferring the power to the governor or (as normally happens) to a general plebiscite. | |
| Apr 6 at 1:14 | comment | added | Michael Hardy | You say it's up to the states how to choose the electors, but to be clear, one should note that it's up to the legislatures of the states. The governor could appoint all of the electors ONLY if the legislature decided that that is what is to be done. | |
| Apr 5 at 22:03 | comment | added | bof | By 270-270 you mean 269-269 as the total number of electors is 538 = 435 + 100 +3. (This correction is 12 years late, but better late than never.) | |
| Oct 24, 2012 at 22:01 | history | edited | T.E.D.♦ | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Oct 24, 2012 at 20:49 | comment | added | T.E.D.♦ | Yeah. We really need another question to discuss this properly. I suppose we could slap it out in chat, but how useful would that be? | |
| Oct 24, 2012 at 20:23 | comment | added | MichaelF | @T.E.D. I disagree, if he had been able to build up his support he could have actually made enough progress to pull in electoral votes in some states and he did try with whatever party he built at the time but there was not enough disaffection with the other two parties to carry this. The Tea Party shows it could be done if outside of the framework of either the R or D. I'll let it go at that. | |
| Oct 24, 2012 at 17:58 | comment | added | T.E.D.♦ | @MichaelF - No, he couldn't have. This might make a good question, but in 260 words or less, the only way to get the kind of 3-way splits we last saw in 1968 is for one of the parties to have a purely regional powerbase. Otherwise, Duveger's Law applies. Perot's campaign had entirely national themes, so there was no way for him to win a state without displacing the weaker of the other two parties nationally (iow: become one of the two big parties himself). For example, 1968 only happened because conservative southerners just couldn't bring themselves to vote Republican. | |
| Oct 24, 2012 at 9:47 | comment | added | MichaelF | If Ross Perot had actually run within a party he could have changed that | |
| Oct 23, 2012 at 21:16 | comment | added | T.E.D.♦ | @KeithThompson - I belive the term I used was not "in today's universe". I stand by that. No third party has gotten a significant number of electoral votes since 1968. If the "universe" changes, I promise to come back and edit my wording. :-) | |
| Oct 23, 2012 at 20:44 | comment | added | Keith Thompson | Typically, it's the candidate who got a plurality of the popular vote, not necessarily the majority. Third-party candidates can easily result in no candidate getting an absolute majority (more than 50%). As for your third point, if a third-party candidate got some electoral votes, that could send the election to the House. That's not particularly likely. | |
| Oct 23, 2012 at 18:43 | history | answered | T.E.D.♦ | CC BY-SA 3.0 |