Source: http://excessofdemocracy.com/?category=Electoral+College
Timestamp: 2019-04-20 00:28:10+00:00

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I'm pleased to share a brief I filed in Baca v. Colorado Department of State, a Tenth Circuit case concerning the power of state legislatures to cabin the discretion of presidential electors. You can view the brief here. It's part of a larger project on some archival research on original practices of the states concerning presidential electors--but, alas, the litigation calendar does not await the academic one!
The text of the Constitution offers little about the scope of state authority to regulate presidential electors. And there is little judicial precedent about the proper scope of authority of states regulating presidential electors. See, e.g., Ray v. Blair, 343 U.S. 214 (1952). But there are extensive practices in states and in Congress—including practices at the time of the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment—that may help this Court determine the liquidated meaning of these constitutional provisions. Cf. The Federalist No. 37, at 236 (James Madison) (J.E. Cook ed., 1961).
These state and congressional practices reveal three conclusions. First, presidential electors have no right to anonymity when casting their ballots. Second, states have the power to replace presidential electors and levy fines on presidential electors, even after those electors have been selected. Third, Congress holds the power to scrutinize and even reject the electoral votes. In 2017, however, Congress counted Colorado’s electoral votes, and this Court has been asked to revisit a decision reserved to the judgment of Congress. When this Court decides this case, it should interpret the Twelfth Amendment through the practices of the states and of Congress.
David Boies is leading an effort to challenge the winner-take-all method that most states use when awarding presidential electors. There are different ways states might award electors (which I used to project alternative electoral outcomes in 2016).
Since Election Day, a number of litigants--admittedly, mostly (if not all!) pro se--have attempted to file just such challenges. They've lost every time (0-6 by my count).
Schweikert v. Herring (W.D. Va. 2016): "The precise issue contained in Plaintiff’s complaint was previously litigated, dismissed, and affirmed summarily by the Supreme Court. Williams v. Virginia State Bd. of Elections, 288 F. Supp. 622 (E.D. Va. 1968) (3 judge court), aff’d per curiam, 393 U.S. 320 (1969), reh’g denied, 393 U.S. 1112 (1969) . This Court lacks the authority to reach a conclusion that directly contradicts the Supreme Court’s own jurisprudence—which is precisely what Plaintiff’s complaint would ask this Court to do. Accordingly the case must be dismissed."
Birke v.The 538 Individual Members of the Electoral College (C.D. Cal. 2016): "to the extent Plaintiff challenges some states' 'winner-take-all' procedures . . . Plaintiff's challenges similarly lack merit. . . . Williams v. Virginia State Bd. of Elections, 288 F. Supp. 622 (E.D. Va. 1986), aff'd, 393 U.S. 320 (1969) (per curiam) (upholding 'winner-take-all' procedure for choosing electors)."
Conant v. Brown (D. Or. 2017): "Plaintiff's arguments are foreclosed by Supreme Court precedent. In a 1969 case, the Supreme Court summarily affirmed, per curiam, the district court's rejection of constitutional challenges to Virginia's method of providing electors to the electoral college based on a plurality vote in a statewide election. Williams v. Va. St. Bd. of Elections, 393 U.S. 320 (1969) (per curiam)."; affirmed, 726 Fed. App’x 611 (9th Cir. 2018).
Schultz v. Roberts (S.D. Cal. 2017): "The Electoral College system is specifically provided for by the Twelfth Amendment. Gray v. Sanders, 372 U.S. 368, 380 (1963) (“The only weighting of votes sanctioned by the Constitution concerns matters of representation, such as . . . the use of the electoral college in the choice of a President.”). Schwartz does not allege any facts to support his claim that the Electoral College system violates his constitutional right to equal protection."; affirmed, 2018 WL 5314057 (9th Cir. 2018).
Williams v. North Carolina (W.D.N.C. 2017): "Defendants conclude that Plaintiff’s claims in this matter regarding the winner-take-all method of appointing electors do not differ significantly, if at all, from those asserted in McPherson, Delaware, Penton, Williams, Schweikert, Hitson, Conant, or Birke. The opinions in these cases, particularly the Supreme Court’s opinion in Blacker and summary affirmation of Williams, apply herein."
Of course, part of litigation like this is theatrical. Another part of litigation like this is to get the Supreme Court to address the merits of the dispute, even if lower courts ought, under existing precedent, summarily dismiss such claims. But, time will tell whether this effort is any more successful than the many, many failed efforts that have gone before.
Update: Park v. Parnell (D. Alaska 2016): "As Judge Kleinfeld articulately stated, '[o]ur Constitution requires that electoral votes be cast state-by-state, not that the President be elected by plurality or majority of the nationwide popular vote.... Whether the electoral college and winner-take-all casting of electoral votes is a good idea or not has no bearing on the law. Article II, section 1 and the Twelfth Amendment are the Constitution we have.' Park's remedy lies in the constitutional amendment process, and not with the courts."
Update: Liu v. Ryan (2d Cir. 2018): "Here, Liu admits that his alleged injury is widely shared by the vast majority of Americans, and that injury is derivative because the Constitution grants states, not individuals, the right to select presidential electors, such that any harm arising from the disproportionality of the Electoral College belongs, in the first instance, to the states."
After the low-turnout, high-pro-statehood referendum in Puerto Rico last weekend, despite the low likelihood of it becoming a state, it's worth considering the impact that statehood might have in representation and elections.
Puerto Rico would receive two Senators, increasing the size of the Senate to 102.
This would also mean that in presidential elections, Puerto Rico would have 7 electoral votes, and these five states would each lose an electoral vote. The electoral vote total would be 540, and it would take 271 votes to win.
Would doubling the size of the House affected the Electoral College outcome in 2016?
A common mantra after the presidential election sounded something like this: "California is so much larger than Wyoming, but a vote cast in California has only a third of the value of a vote cast in Wyoming in the presidential election." Or something like that. This, in turn, is often a proxy for criticizing the Electoral College.
The Electoral College allocates electors based on the total number of members of the House and Senate each State has--and, as each State is guaranteed at least one House representative, no matter how small, and exactly two Senators, no matter the size, each state will receive at least three electoral votes. With a House of 435 members, a Senate of 100 members, and 3 votes for the District of Columbia, we get 538 electoral votes, 270 needed to win.
In some ways, the real problem people have with this disparity is the United States Senate itself. But much of the reason that this disparity exists is because the size of the House of Representatives has not increased since 1929. The Reapportionment Act of 1929 capped the size of the House at 435 members--and, as a result, capped the size of the Electoral College. It meant that disparities in the Electoral College would increase as populations shifted.
Roughly doubling the size of the House to 871 members would give better representation based on total population. And it would do so without any need for a constitutional amendment--a simple statute from Congress could help equalize this spread. But would it have changed anything in the 2016 presidential outcome? Not really-it would smooth out some of the disparities but have no meaningful effect on the outcome (except to actually widen the margin of Donald Trump's victory).
Using the Equal Proportions Method, we can fairly quickly calculate how these 871 seats would be allocated based on the 2010 census. The smallest state in this scenario receives two House members. We'd then add in 100 electors for the Senate, another 4 electors for the District of Columbia, and come to a nice round 975 electoral votes: 488 votes to win. And like the five fictional Electoral College outcomes I provided recently, we can recalculate the 2016 election after our newly-constructed House.
By giving California a whopping 104 members in the House--and 106 electoral votes--we'd see the 2016 totals drop to 133,788 votes cast per electoral vote. In Wyoming, which would get a second member in the House and 4 electoral votes, it would have 63,962 votes cast per electoral vote. The California:Wyoming ratio would drop from 3:1 to 2:1. That would certainly improve the disparity, but hardly cure it.
And despite improving the disparity, we see little change in the overall outcome. (I assumed a winner-take-all in each state, despite Maine's and Nebraska's systems.) It yielded 547 electoral votes for Mr. Trump to 428 for Hillary Clinton--a comfortable margin of victory, and by raw pledged electors much larger than his actual 2016 victory. So while it might help reduce some of the rhetoric regarding disparities in vote power across states--and improve some of the actual voting power--it wouldn't offer any dramatic change to our system.
I have the complete breakdown of electoral votes below. If you'd like to reverse-engineer the House figures, simply subtract two from each state.
In today's WSJ: "Faithless Electors: Now It’s Up to Congress"
The 538 members of the Electoral College convened Monday and cast a majority of their votes for Donald Trump for president and Mike Pence for vice president. When Congress convenes on Jan. 6 to count the votes, it will mostly be a formality. But its decision to count or exclude the votes of some “faithless electors” will set a precedent for future elections.
These are challenging questions that cannot be answered by a judge or a court. Only Congress decides what to count. And while it won’t change the outcome of this election, its decisions will affect how states handle faithless electors in the 2020 election and beyond.
But litigation occurs in a particular context, and there are significant procedural problems to these claims. Those problems may prevent courts from reaching the merits of such claims. These claims all seriously struggle from the likely defense of laches, as the electors have brought claims just days before the Electoral College is scheduled to meet--when they have been nominees for many months, and when they knew they would be called to serve as of November 9. It is not immediately obvious that the state laws in California and Colorado empower state election officials to remove "faithless" electors from their offices, which suggests that abstention might apply, or simply the application of a canon of statutory interpretation that invokes the constitutional avoidance doctrine. The pleadings of some do not make it obvious that the electors intend to violate their pledge, only that they want to liberty to do so, which may (perhaps) lead to ripeness issues or even the failure to state a claim.
But even setting these procedural issues aside, the curious nature of these claims is where they have been filed. They are purporting to be an "anti-Trump" movement. But, these are Clinton electors in states carried by Mrs. Clinton! That is, their movement would undermine the Democratic candidate's ability to succeed in the Electoral College! And even total victory in these states would yield a grand total of zero Trump electors voting for someone other than Mr. Trump!
Now, I suppose there are two long-game purposes in this effort. The first is for these electors to force a kind of "national conversation" about the independent judgment of electors and to (quite publicly) encourage Trump electors to join them and vote for someone other than Mr. Trump. (Of course, they were already voting for someone other than Mr. Trump.) While freeing Clinton electors from their pledge has zero impact on the bottom line--if every Clinton elector voted for, say, John Kasich, then Trump still wins with 306 electoral votes--it could spark discussion with other electors.
The second is that a ruling in one court, perhaps appealed to a circuit court or even the Supreme Court, would have a ripple effect in other jurisdictions with Trump electors. Given the procedural hurdles already in place, it is unlikely that this could happen, but remains a possibility.
Of course, further buried within these electors' lawsuits is that they have largely been filed by former (and, perhaps, current) supporters of Bernie Sanders, some of whom before even Election Day expressed public displeasure at the prospect of casting votes for Mrs. Clinton. While the salutary effort is something in the vein of "anti-Trump," in reality it seems to be driven more by anti... well, Democratic establishment, at least for these particular Colorado and Washington electors.
So these lawsuits are not really designed to stop Mr. Trump from securing 306 electoral votes (or, really, the 270 electoral votes he needs to win). But it has created some rather curious alliances. For instance, the Republican elected officials called to defend the law in Colorado have come out quite strongly against the plaintiffs--that is, these Republicans are aggressively defending Mrs. Clinton's electoral vote total in Colorado. And the Colorado Republican Party has intervened in the case--and the Colorado Democratic Party has not.
That said, it is, I think, less curious than one might expect, at least the behavior of Republicans and when viewed through a (perhaps) Rawlsian framework. One might take the myopic view and claim that Colorado Republicans are trying to defend Mr. Trump's election, but that strikes me fairly unlikely--consider the two long-game purposes I enumerated above, which are exceedingly remote; and consider that the direct impact of the litigation would undermine Mrs. Clinton's position far more than Mr. Trump's.
Instead, consider what it would mean in a state--any state, regardless of your partisan preference--if you had fairly settled expectations of the roles of electors, and even a law that carried some generic threat against electors who acted against their pledge, and those settled expectations were called into question. As a member of a political party or a loyal partisan official, such a result would be fairly horrifying. After all, it would mean that your formerly-loyal slate of electors would now be open to influence; and even if your party's slate of electors did not win this particular election, it would also affect your slate of electors in future elections when you did win.
Despite the fact that electors may prefer independence (and that the Constitution, in my view, mandates it!), parties certainly do not prefer it. It is a reason they are empowered in most states to choose the slates of presidential electors. And it is a terrific loss of power if those electors now expect to act freely--indeed, so freely that they may undermine the party's nominee. The rational behavior of partisan officials, then, would be to defend such laws quite vigorously, regardless of partisan affiliation.
I expect, then, that this behavior of presidential electors will fairly significantly alter the behavior of political parties selecting slates of presidential electors in 2020, particularly if parties are worried that the legal pledges and settled expectations from previous elections have been called into grave doubt. Party reforms are some of the easiest reforms, because they require no new laws. But I would expect, at least in some jurisdictions, to see to following changes.
First, I would expect to see delays in the selection of slates of electors. Parties typically nominate slates of electors in the spring or summer, often before the parties' nominating conventions (and sometimes even before the parties' nominees are known). But in most states, such slates need not be submitted until just weeks before the November election date.
Second, parties are likely to engage in far greater vetting of such nominees. By postponing the selection process, parties might be more inclined to choose electors who have already gone on record expressing support of the party's presumptive nominee.
Third, parties might institute more control over who qualifies as electors for their party. They often include rules that one must be a member of that party, such as someone who voted in that party's primary. But they may require longer periods of party affiliationor greater demonstration of loyalty before qualifying as an elector.
Fourth, parties may defer to the presumptive nominee in selecting slates of electors. It's understandable why Bill Clinton was an elector in New York, of course! And greater control to candidates would ensure greater loyalty for nominees.
It is the case, I think, that these electors' efforts to sue to undo state pledges will likely fail; and that even in success the Electoral College will not meaningfully affect the settled expectations of the outcome of this election. But after all this, when the dust settles, I anticipate some significant change in behavior from political parties to fend off future efforts from electors to undermine their own preferences.

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