If Hillary Clinton has to withdraw for health reasons...

[Mr. Morden]

My understanding is that if a candidate withdraws after the general election, but before the electoral college meets, federal law says that electors can vote for whomever they want (although states can pass their own laws on the matter.)  The Clinton campaign knows this so they would not likely drop out during that period no matter the condition of her health. 

I don't agree with that.  If there were really an emergency that forced Clinton to drop out, this doesn't really seem like a stumbling block.  Clinton's electors aren't swing voters.  They're partisan Democrats.  If she dropped out and they were free to support anyone, then they'd choose a consensus replacement that they'd all agree on (probably Kaine) in order to insure that a Dem. still gets a majority in the electoral college and it isn't thrown to the House.

Without the pledge, there would be defections. These electors are generally strangers to each other and they never meet as one body - they cast their votes in their own state capitals and each state sends their own votes to Congress for tabulation. It's not that they can't contact each other, but the system works against it. Obviously if Hillary has an 80 vote cushion or whatever it would work, but if she's under 300 EVs, it would take at least some luck. Plus there might be a few "OnlyHillary" electors that will vote for her withdrawn candidacy no matter what.

I seriously doubt that.  There might be one or two defections, but I can't see there being a critical mass of defections that would actually prevent a majority.  Sure, they historically never meet as one body because there's no need to.  ~99% of the time it's clear who they're going to vote for, and their selection is a formality.  But in the kind of extraordinary circumstances being envisioned here, there would obviously be tons of coordination among them, in order to insure that a Democrat is elected.

[Sir Mohamed]

All of them would defeat the Trumpster.

[ag]

Does not, really, matter much. Either Biden or Kaine would be fine. Sanders would be difficult, since he would be easily depicted as too extreme. And I can only imagine the wave of anti-semitism that Trump would raise and try to ride.

[Ebsy]

What an awful thread.

[angus]

~99% of the time it's clear who they're going to vote for, and their selection is a formality. 

No doubt, and such will likely be the case this year, but the situation described above is without precedent, and electors might be faithless for a number of reasons, especially since there may be no state laws dealing with that particular situation.

I don't think it would come up.  Surely the "exploratory" committee she formed several years ago would have advised her against running for president if she had been in poor health at the time.  Pneumonia is bad--I was out of school for three painful weeks in the eleventh grade due to pneumonia--but she will get over it if that's really the only problem.

[Senator Spark]

Hopefully this does happen, and Kaine.