Do faithless electors change presidential election results?
As we approach one of the closest presidential elections in history, Americans are once again asking whether “faithless electors” could change the outcome. This post overviews the history of faithless electors, as well as state laws limiting their impact. For a more detailed list of faithless electors throughout history, see our presidential elections page.
Overwhelmingly, electors in the Electoral College have faithfully voted for their party’s presidential and vice presidential nominees. However, occasionally they do not. Electors in the Electoral College who cast a vote for someone other than their party’s presidential and vice presidential nominees are called “faithless electors.”
Faithless electors have never changed the outcome of a presidential election, and most states have laws prohibiting faithless votes. Read on to learn more about both topics.
Faithless elector state laws
Thirty-eight states and Washington, D.C. require electors to vote for the candidate they pledged to support. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld these laws in 2020 in Chiafalo v. Washington, which held that states may require pledges and penalize or cancel deviant votes.
Faithless electors throughout history
To date, only one elector — Samuel Miles — has cast a vote for the opposite party’s nominee instead of his own in a close contest. In 1796, in the first contested presidential election, Miles, a Federalist elector from Pennsylvania, voted for Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson instead of Federalist John Adams.
90 faithless electors for president
Altogether, 23,507 electoral votes have been counted across 58 presidential elections. Only 90 electors have cast “deviant” votes, but most were due to the death of a party’s nominee rather than a true deviation from the voters’ intent. More than two-thirds of deviant votes (63) were due to the death of the party’s nominee. Twenty-four of the remaining 27 were cast for another candidate, three of which were canceled or retracted by state law. Only one — Samuel Miles in 1796 — one was cast for the opposite party’s nominee in a close election. The final three “deviant” votes consist of one abstention, one abnormal vote (switching the presidential and vice presidential nominees) and one apparent accident.
75 faithless electors for vice president
There have been 75 incidents of electors casting faithful votes for president but casting some sort of deviant vote for vice president, although no such incident has ever changed the outcome for vice president. Many, but not all, of the electors who cast deviant votes for president also cast deviant votes for vice president. Combining these shows that a total of 165 electors have cast deviant votes, either for president or vice president or both.
There are a few instances of electors failing to vote due to illness, but these are not intentional abstentions so they are not included in the total. Under modern election rules, such electors would be substituted with replacements.
For more information on faithless electors and presidential elections, visit this page.
