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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Northwest electors will cast their votes for president on Monday

President Donald Trump, left, and President-elect Joe Biden, left, take the stage for the start of a debate at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, in October 2020.   (Patrick Semansky/Associated Press)

Whether you marked your ballot for Joe Biden, Donald Trump or one of the minor party presidential candidates in the Nov. 3 election, you didn’t really vote for them.

Instead, you voted for people who would vote for them on Monday.

That’s when the Electoral College meets to take the next big step in selecting who will be president for the next four years. Most will meet in state capitals.

It’s a college without a faculty, a campus or a basketball team. It exists for just one day every four years, and its membership changes from meeting to meeting. It is an unusual American institution, designed by 18th-century efforts to compromise in the U.S. Constitution that some argue don’t fit the 21st century.

It has nothing to do with democracy, which despite what you may have heard was not favored by many Founding Fathers. Most didn’t envision a popular vote for president and proposed ways for the states or Congress to pick the nation’s chief executive. Eventually they settled on giving state Legislatures the power to appoint electors who would meet to cast votes for president and report their tallies to Congress.

In other words, the people would pick the people who pick the people who pick the president.

Part of the compromise was to give each state one elector for each of their two senators, and one elector for each member of the House. That was a way to allay concerns of less populous states – and those with large slave populations who were counted as three-fifths of a person under a separate section for determining the size of House delegations – that they would be at a disadvantage with larger states.

Eventually, state legislatures tied electors to their state’s presidential vote, and the job of picking people to be electors usually was assigned to political parties. But there were questions about how closely the electors were tied to their state’s popular vote and whether they could exercise their judgment to vote for someone else.

Restraining ‘faithless electors’

The U.S. Supreme Court helped clarify that question in a ruling earlier this year that stems from the meeting of the Washington Electoral College in 2016. Although the state voted overwhelmingly for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, four electors voted for other people – three for former Gen. Colin Powell, one for Native American activist Faith Spotted Eagle.

The three who voted for Powell said it was part of a failed effort to deny Trump the presidency by convincing Trump electors in other states to vote for someone else. All four were each fined $1,000 under the “faithless elector” law in place at the time, and the three Powell electors appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the fine was upheld unanimously in July.

States have the authority to enforce laws that require electors to follow the voters’ choice, Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the majority opinion.

The state has since changed the law to require any elector who won’t vote for the presidential candidate with the most votes in Washington to be automatically replaced with an alternate who will.

Washington had one other faithless elector experience in 1976, when Mike Padden, a supporter of Ronald Reagan, voted for Reagan instead of Gerald Ford, who beat Jimmy Carter in Washington in that year’s election. The state had no faithless elector law at the time. Padden later became a state representative, a district court judge and is now a state senator.

Constitution was changed

The phrase Electoral College does not actually appear in the Constitution, which describes the election of the president in Article II Section 1. That section primarily describes the electors meeting and how their votes choose the president. It also says they can’t be a member of Congress or hold “an office of profit or trust under the United States,” which has been interpreted to mean they can’t be a federal employee or a member of the military.

Originally, the electors would vote for two people: the person with the most votes would be president and the person with the second-most would be vice president. That created a problem almost immediately, because in 1796 John Adams got the most votes and his opponent Thomas Jefferson finished second and became vice president.

Four years later, Jefferson and Aaron Burr were running as a ticket on the Democratic Republican ticket against Adams, and one elector was supposed to withhold a vote for Burr to make him vice president. But that didn’t happen, and the two tied for the most votes. Under the Constitution, that sent the selection of president into the House of Representatives, which took 36 votes and a decision by Alexander Hamilton to vote for Jefferson, with whom he often disagreed, over Burr, who he didn’t trust. In 1804, the Constitution was amended so electors voted separately for a president and a vice president.

Popular vote doesn’t decide

Most elections, the winner of the Electoral College vote is also the winner of the popular vote and becomes president. But not always.

In 1824, Andrew Jackson received the most popular votes and the most Electoral College votes, but not a majority of either. The election was thrown into the House, where the Constitution requires members pick among the top three candidates in the elector tally.

That left out House Speaker Henry Clay, who finished fourth. Clay threw his support behind John Quincy Adams, who finished second in the electoral voting and promised to appoint Clay secretary of state. Adams became the first and so far only person to become president without a majority of the popular vote and the electoral vote.

In 1860, Abraham Lincoln easily got a majority of the electoral vote on the strength of winning much of the Northeast and Midwest, along with California and Oregon. But he won only a plurality, not a majority, of the popular vote, which was split among four candidates.

In 1876, Samuel Tilden won the popular vote by about 260,000 votes, but the results were disputed in three states. Without those states, Tilden was one vote shy of the majority in the Electoral College. Rather than have the House pick the president and the Senate pick the vice president, as the Constitution says, Congress set up a commission to study the state disputes. Originally it had seven Democrats, seven Republicans and one independent, but the independent stepped down to take an appointment to the U.S. Senate and was replaced by a Republican. All of the contested states were decided in favor of Hayes on party-line votes. As part of that deal, Hayes had agreed to allow Southern states to regain control they had lost during Reconstruction.

In 1888, President Grover Cleveland won the popular vote by about 100,000 votes, but Republican Benjamin Harrison won more states in the East and upper Midwest with more electors and was elected president. Four years later, Cleveland beat Harrison in both the electoral and popular votes, although Harrison and Populist James Weaver together got more popular votes than Cleveland.

In 1912, Democrat Woodrow Wilson won the Electoral College vote by a landslide, but only a plurality of the popular vote, which he split with former President Theodore Roosevelt and incumbent Republican William Taft.

In 1968, Republican Richard Nixon won the Electoral College vote but only a plurality of the popular vote, which he split with Democrat Hubert Humphrey and American Independent Party candidate George Wallace.

In 1992, Democrat Bill Clinton won the electoral vote with more than twice the electors of incumbent George H.W. Bush. But Bush and independent H. Ross Perot together got about 14 million more votes than Clinton.

In 2000, Republican George W. Bush was ahead in the Electoral College vote and Democrat Al Gore ahead in the popular vote, but the results in Florida were in dispute. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Bush and Gore conceded.

In 2016, Republican Trump easily won the Electoral College vote, although Democrat Hillary Clinton got some 3 million more popular votes. Trump had 306 electoral votes, the same number Biden is expected to have after the Electoral College meets Monday, although Biden topped Trump by about 7 million in the popular vote.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story has been clarified to reflect that Gerald Ford beat Jimmy Carter in Washington in 1976.