Did 2016 break everyone's brain in regards to faithless electors?
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  Did 2016 break everyone's brain in regards to faithless electors?
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Question: Did 2016 break everyone's brain in regards to faithless electors?
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Yes
 
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No
 
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Author Topic: Did 2016 break everyone's brain in regards to faithless electors?  (Read 553 times)
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BRTD
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« on: November 30, 2021, 10:30:34 PM »

There are a lot of takes that aged horribly and in hindsight were laughably dumb even at the time, obvious examples being anything about Kanye West being a spoiler or that the Supreme Court was going to just throw out the election results and declare Trump the winner...but I think the faithless elector talk was an underrated one. A lot of people here seemed to believe that Biden's electoral slates would be full of Bernie or Busters who were still going to vote for Bernie or Faith Spotted Eagle or whoever, some really batsh!t conspiracy stuff going around some corners was even that Trump had infiltrated Biden's slates or would blackmail electors into voting for him....I saw some predictions that as many as 10% of Biden's electors wouldn't vote for him.

In reality faithless electors are actually pretty rare. Prior to 2016 the last one was in 2004, and was likely an accident, prior to that there was one in 2000 but she even stated it was a protest vote that she wouldn't have cast if Gore was winning and prior to that you have to go all the way back to 1988 for the most recent. Also 2016 was the first election with more than one faithless elector since 1912, and even that is an asterisk since the Republican VP candidate died before the electoral count and thus while all EVs were technically cast for a different candidate than on the ballot it's obvious why...before that you have to go to 1896 which was due to some multiple tickets nominating William Jennings Bryan weirdness, and prior to that 1872 for the obvious reasons of Horace Greeley's death. So to find a "pure" example of multiple faithless electors you'd have to go all the way back to 1836. 2016 actually had more faithless electors than all other post-1912 elections COMBINED.

Furthermore Chiafalo v. Washington made faithless electors even more unlikely and many states established laws allowing for them to be voided and replaced. They were clearly going to be less common and will as time goes on.

And of course there wasn't a single one, that shouldn't have been a surprise, but many people legitimately were.
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Skill and Chance
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« Reply #1 on: December 06, 2021, 08:47:31 AM »

Yes, this was always overrated.  2016 was unique in that it had a wing of each party who both despised their nominee but weren't ready to leave yet.

I also highly doubt the courts and congress would allow faithless electors to actually change the outcome. 

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