My Twitter feed is filling with tweets like this:
Here’s the skinny.
In 2016, soon after the election, I wrote an essay in the Washington Post arguing that electors were free to vote contrary to their pledge, and that, like the first such “faithless” vote by any elector (Sam Miles, 1796), voting to follow the popular will over a party pledge was a legitimate reason to vote contrary to a pledge. Hillary Clinton had won the popular vote—by a lot. Electors, I believed, had a constitutional discretion to consider that fact before they voted. This belief was not uncommon among lawyers and historians studying the matter. Here is, for example, Supreme Court Justice Jackson:
No one faithful to our history can deny that the plan originally contemplated, what is implicit in its text, that electors would be free agents, to exercise an independent and nonpartisan judgment as to the men best qualified for the Nation’s highest offices.
At about the same time, others, no doubt more realistically, believing it impossible for Republican electors to vote for Clinton, thought it…
