Faithless electors in the 2016 United States presidential election

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In the 2016 United States presidential election, ten members of the Electoral College voted or attempted to vote for a candidate different from the ones to whom they were pledged.^[1] Three of these votes were invalidated under the faithless elector laws of their respective states, and the elector either subsequently voted for the pledged candidate or was replaced by someone who did.^[2][3][4] Although there had been a combined total of 155 instances of individual electors voting faithlessly prior to 2016 in over two centuries of previous US presidential elections, 2016 was the first election in over a hundred years in which multiple electors worked to alter the result of the election.^[1]

As a result of the seven successfully cast faithless votes, the Democratic Party nominee, Hillary Clinton, lost five of her pledged electors while the Republican Party nominee and then president-elect, Donald Trump, lost two. Three of the faithless electors voted for Colin Powell while John Kasich, Ron Paul, Bernie Sanders, and Faith Spotted Eagle each received one vote. The defections fell well short of the number needed to change the result of the election; only two of the seven defected from the winner, whereas 37 were needed to defect in order to force a contingent election in Congress (a tally of less than 270).^[5]

The faithless electors who opposed Donald Trump were part of a movement dubbed the "Hamilton Electors" co-founded by Micheal Baca of Colorado and Bret Chiafalo of Washington. The movement attempted to find 37 Republican electors willing to vote for a different Republican in an effort to deny Donald Trump a majority in the Electoral College and force a contingent election in the House of Representatives. The electors advocated for voting their conscience to prevent the election of someone they viewed as unfit for the presidency as prescribed by Alexander Hamilton in No. 68 of The Federalist Papers.^[6][7] Despite their stated intentions to defeat Donald Trump, these electors cast their votes for persons other than the candidate to whom they were pledged, Trump's opponent Hillary Clinton.^[8] By the time they switched their votes away from Trump's opponent, it was numerically impossible to achieve their stated goal as all but 30 of the Trump-pledged electoral votes had already been cast (in different states in the same or later time zones), with 37 votes needed to switch to deny Trump an outright victory in the Electoral College. Electors were subjected to public pressure, including threats of death if they remained faithful to voting for Trump.^[9] The Washington elector who voted for Faith Spotted Eagle did so in protest of Hillary Clinton's support for the Dakota Access Pipeline.

The seven validated faithless votes for president were the most to defect from presidential candidates who were still alive in electoral college history, surpassing the six electors who defected from James Madison in the 1808 election.^[10] This number of defections has been exceeded only once: in 1872, a record 63 of 66 electors who were originally pledged to losing candidate Horace Greeley cast their votes for someone else (Greeley had died between election day and the meeting of the Electoral College). The six faithless vice-presidential votes in 2016 are short of the record for that office, without considering whether the vice-presidential candidates were still living, as multiple previous elections have had more than six faithless vice-presidential votes; in 1836, faithless electors moved the vice-presidential decision to the US Senate, though this did not affect the outcome.^[11]