|
In United States presidential elections, a faithless elector is a member of the United States Electoral College who does not vote for the presidential or vice presidential candidate for whom he or she had pledged to vote. They may vote for another candidate or not vote at all. Faithless electors are pledged electors and thus different from unpledged electors. Electors are typically chosen and nominated by a political party or the party's presidential nominee. Electors usually are party members with a reputation for high loyalty to the party and its candidate. A faithless elector runs the risk of party censure and political retaliation from their party as well as, in some states, potential criminal penalties. Candidates for elector are nominated by state political parties in the months prior to Election Day. In some states, the electors are nominated in primaries, the same way that other candidates are nominated. In some states, such as Oklahoma, Virginia and North Carolina, electors are nominated in party conventions. In Pennsylvania, the campaign committee of each candidate names their candidates for elector (an attempt to discourage faithless electors).〔(ElectoralVote.com – Current Assigning of Electors )〕 The parties have generally been successful in keeping their electors faithful, leaving out the cases in which a candidate died before the elector was able to cast a vote. Although there have been 157 cases of faithlessness , faithless electors have not yet changed the outcome of any presidential election. ==Legal position== Twenty-one states do not have laws that compel their electors to vote for a pledged candidate.〔(For 2000 list of 24 states, see )〕 Twenty-nine states plus the District of Columbia have laws to penalize faithless electors, although these have never been enforced.〔 In place of penalizing a faithless elector, some states, like Michigan and Minnesota, specify that the faithless elector's vote is void.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Michigan Election Law Section 168.47 )〕 Until 2008, Minnesota's electors cast secret ballots, so that it was not possible to tell if a particular elector was faithless. When in 2004 an unknown elector was faithless, Minnesota law was amended to provide for public balloting of the electors' votes and invalidation of a vote cast for someone other than the candidate to whom the elector is pledged. The constitutionality of state ''pledge'' laws was confirmed by the Supreme Court in 1952 in ''Ray v. Blair''.〔''Ray v. Blair'' 〕 The court ruled in favor of the state's right to require electors to pledge to vote for the candidate to whom they are pledged, as well as to remove electors who refuse to pledge. Once the elector has voted, his or her vote can be changed only in states such as Michigan and Minnesota, where votes other than those pledged are rendered invalid. In the twenty-nine states that have laws against faithless electors, a faithless elector may only be punished after he or she votes. The Supreme Court has ruled that, as electors are chosen via state elections, they act as a function of the state, not the federal government. Therefore states have the right to govern electors. The constitutionality of state laws punishing electors for actually casting a faithless vote—rather than merely refusing to pledge—has never been decided by the Supreme Court. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Faithless elector」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|