The US Supreme Court unanimously upheld states’ “faithless elector” laws on Monday, which either penalize or remove presidential electors who do not vote for the candidate they pledged to support. The court decided both challenges to “faithless elector” laws on the same grounds.
Currently, 32 states and the District of Columbia have “faithless elector” laws. The pair of cases before the Supreme Court came from Washington and Colorado. The Washington challenge to the laws arose in 2016 when three electors failed to vote for Hillary Clinton after she won the popular vote. They instead wrote in former Secretary of State Colin Powell in hopes of spurring Donald Trump voters to join them.
