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Page Number: 17

14 

CHIAFALO v. WASHINGTON 

Opinion of the Court 

in  this  election  Adams  led  the  Federalists  against  Jeffer-
son’s Republicans.  See supra, at 3.)  In some States, legis-
latures  chose  the  electors;  in  others,  ordinary  voters  did. 
But in either case, the elector’s declaration of support for a
candidate—essentially  a  pledge—was  what  mattered.    Or 
said differently, the selectors of an elector knew just what 
they  were  getting—not  someone  who  would  deliberate  in 
good Hamiltonian fashion, but someone who would vote for 
their  party’s  candidate.    “[T]he  presidential  electors,”  one 
historian writes, “were understood to be instruments for ex-
pressing the will of those who selected them, not independ-
ent  agents  authorized  to  exercise  their  own  judgment.”
Whittington,  Originalism,  Constitutional  Construction, 
and the Problem of Faithless Electors, 59 Ariz. L. Rev. 903, 
911 (2017).  And when the time came to vote in the Electoral 
College,  all  but  one  elector  did  what  everyone  expected, 
faithfully representing their selectors’ choice of presidential 
candidate.7 

The  Twelfth  Amendment  embraced  this  new  reality—
both acknowledging and facilitating the Electoral College’s
emergence  as  a  mechanism  not  for  deliberation  but  for 
party-line  voting.    Remember  that  the  Amendment  grew
out of a pair of fiascos—the election of two then-bitter rivals 
—————— 

7 The reaction to even that single elector goes to prove the point that 
the  system  was  non-discretionary.    In  the  1796  election,  Pennsylvania 
held a statewide vote for electors under a winner-take-all rule (as all but 
two States have today).  The people voted narrowly for the slate of elec-
tors supporting Jefferson.  But Federalist chicanery led to the Governor’s
inclusion of two Federalist electors in the State’s delegation to the Elec-
toral  College.  One  of  them,  Samuel  Miles,  agreed  to  cast  his  vote  for
Jefferson, in line with the winner-take-all expectation on which the race 
had been run.  If he thought other Federalists would forgive him for act-
ing with honor, he was wrong.  An irate voter reacted: “[W]hen I voted 
for the [Federalist] ticket, I voted for John Adams. . . . What! do I chuse 
Samuel Miles to determine for me whether John Adams or Thomas Jef-
ferson is the fittest man for President of the United States?  No—I chuse 
him to act, not to think.”  See Gazette of the United States, Dec. 15, 1796, 
p. 3, col. 1 (emphasis in original).