Trump Vs. Biden: ‘Faithless Electors’ Pose Yet Another Potential Election Crisis

SPRINGFIELD -- Just in case Americans don’t have enough to worry about, Timothy Vercellotti sees a new potential crisis lurking next month: faithless electors.

In general, the Western New England University political science professor takes a dim view of an election process that came out of the 1787 Constitutional Convention.

On the brighter side, another WNEU professor, John Baick, says Election Day came and went without the chaos at the polls that many people -- including himself -- had feared.

Vercellotti’s observations were directed at a constitutional fact many Americans still don’t realize: They do not directly elect the president. They are represented by electors chosen in each state through the political parties.

Electors will meet in their respective state capitals on Dec. 14 to cast their electoral votes for the winner of the state’s November vote. Most states, but not all, have laws prohibiting electors from voting contrary to their state’s majority vote. But in 2016, seven of the 538 electors did just that.

Vercellotti said the legality of a rogue elector deviating from the popular vote has never been fully tested in court.

“I’m hard-pressed to find a justification for the Electoral College. It’s a perverse way of choosing a president,” Vercellotti said.

“The framers of the Constitution did not fully trust the public. They thought the electors could fix their mistakes.”

In 2020, though, the concept of a politically appointed elector changing the outcome of a presidential election by ignoring the wishes of the voters would be anathema to the vast majority of citizens.

Could it happen? Yes, Vercellotti said.

“If the final electoral vote were 270-268 (as was possible by Wednesday afternoon), you could see the potential for tampering,” he said.

A candidate needs at least 270 electoral votes to win, so subtracting even one from the winner’s side could throw the election into chaos.

Baick acknowledged the possibility, but thought it unlikely.

“It would be possible, but wow. In this strange season, nothing can be discounted. If Biden stops at 270 electoral votes, it’s vaguely within the realm, but if he picked up another state, it would be very, very difficult,” said Baick, who teaches history.

Faithless electors have never changed an election’s outcome. The 2016 rebellion cost Donald Trump two electors, but still went on to win with 304 electoral votes. Hillary Clinton lost five electors, but even if they had stayed faithful, she still would have been well short of the 270 electoral votes needed to win.

The seven faithless electors in 2016 represented the greatest number since 1808 -- with the exception of 1872, when Democrat Horace Greeley, the losing candidate, died before the Electoral College met.

Baick took a moment to inject some positivity in an election many people have found unsettling.

“Election Day was not the dumpster fire a lot of us, myself included, had expected. I thought there might be more chaos, more intimidating of voters. There were isolated cases, but overall democracy did pretty well,” he said.

Baick lauded poll workers, drawn from the ranks of both parties, for delivering an election with respect to the traditions of voting and the law.

Trump’s premature “victory speech” early Wednesday “was a strangely flat performance,” Baick said. The words but there, but the verve of a typical Trump presentation was lacking, he said.

Baick thought Trump’s rallies to get out the vote were effective, “whether they were super-spreaders (of the coronavirus) or not.” But in the end, “in a weird way, it looked like Hillary Clinton 2016 in reverse. He though he had the votes in Michigan, and in Wisconsin, but in the end, they drifted away,” Baick said.

As director of the WNEU Polling Institute, Vercellotti expressed concern the public was losing faith in the value of polls. Most predicted a decisive win for Biden, but as ballot counting continues Biden’s path to victory appears narrower.

Vercellotti emphasized that pollsters should not be expected to be fortune tellers.

“People want polls to predict outcomes. They were never designed to do that,” he said.

“We want to know the end of the story before we get there. We like certainties, but polls don’t give that very often.”

“By their nature, they provide snapshots in time, and sometimes of a moving target,” Vercellotti said. “Sometimes it depends on when the poll is completed.”

One survey said 5% of voters made up their minds in the campaign’s last week.

“Those who do polls were hoping 2020 would provide some sort of redemption for 2016,” when Trump’s victory defied expectations, Vercellotti said. “We want people to know there is value to survey research, but if we rely on polls to tell us what will happen next week or next year, we are setting ourselves up for disappointment.”

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