How Many Times Has Anyone Organized Faithless Electors?
In the 2016 US presidential election, seven presidential electors cast their vote for someone other than the candidate who had won their state, across three states. Electors pledged to Hillary Clinton lost five votes; electors pledged to Donald Trump lost two. In the Supreme Court’s own words, it was “the most in a century.” Most people who follow US politics have never heard about it, though it happened within living memory of nearly everyone reading this.
Three of those seven votes, and the plan behind them, have a specific precedent fifty-six years earlier: organized the same way, aimed at the same constitutional fallback, and defeated by roughly the same arithmetic. In two centuries of US presidential elections, only two attempts to organize electors and change who became president ever got off the ground, Henry Irwin’s in 1960 and three Washington electors’ in 2016, and both failed. No other faithless elector since 1948 was trying to change who became president.
Not seven people acting alone
Three of the seven, all pledged to Clinton in Washington, were working together. Peter Bret Chiafalo, Levi Guerra, and Esther John had a plan: recruit electors pledged to Trump, especially in the states he had carried, to abandon him too, and deny him a majority so the choice would go to the House of Representatives, where the Twelfth Amendment gives each state’s delegation one vote. This series has already covered the 270 threshold that fallback turns on.
The Supreme Court’s own account of what came next states the goal plainly: “The idea was to deprive him of a majority of electoral votes and throw the election into the House of Representatives. So the three Electors voted for Colin Powell for President.” Powell had run for nothing that year; he was a vehicle for the plan. Giving up Clinton’s own votes cost the plan nothing, because electoral votes do not transfer between candidates: 270 is a majority of all 538 electors appointed, not a lead over the other side, so Clinton falling from a pledged 232 to a final 227 left Trump’s threshold exactly where it was. What those spare votes bought was a question a Trump elector could plausibly answer. None of them would vote for Clinton, but one might vote for a Republican the other side had already voted for. The Twelfth Amendment gives the House only the three highest names to choose from, so a compromise candidate reaches that list only if electors put him on it.
Nationally, the plan needed 37 of Trump’s 306 pledged electoral votes to move, one more than his 36-vote cushion over the 270 needed outright. Two moved: in Texas, electors pledged to Trump cast their votes for John Kasich and Ron Paul instead. Thirty-five defections short, the plan failed exactly as the arithmetic said it would. “Candidate Trump became President Trump,” the Court noted, and Washington fined its three electors $1,000 each for their votes (Chiafalo v. Washington, slip op. at 6).
It had happened before
In December 1960, Henry D. Irwin, a Republican elector from Bartlesville, Oklahoma, pledged to Richard Nixon, instead cast his vote for Harry F. Byrd of Virginia for president and Barry Goldwater for vice president. The plan behind it was reported the same week, in the Evening Star: “The Southerners had tried to persuade other electors to go along with their revolt against the major parties, but got no takers except Mr. Irwin. They had hoped to prevent Senator Kennedy’s getting a clear majority of the electoral vote, which would have thrown the presidential election into the House of Representatives.” It is, in substance, the design Chiafalo would describe for 2016.
The scale of it became public the following July, when Irwin testified before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee. He had sent telegrams, by his own account, to all the Republican electors in the states Nixon had carried, and he said their replies indicated to him that 200 of them would leave Nixon for “the conservative coalition” if 60 Democratic electors did the same. Cross-examined, he had little more to show for it than vague expressions of sympathy. Neither the sixty nor the 200 materialized, and Irwin voted alone. Contemporaneous reporting traced the effort to R. Lea Harris, a Montgomery, Alabama lawyer, and there was no testimony that Byrd or Goldwater knew about it.
Kennedy’s own cushion that year, 303 electoral votes against a 269 majority, was 34, the exact figure a law review article reprinted into the Congressional Record eight years later used to make the point stick: “it is disquieting to speculate on what a better-organized campaign to subvert electors might have achieved… if Kennedy had had only, say, two or three instead of thirty-four electoral votes over the 269 necessary for a majority” (Rosenthal, 67 Mich. L. Rev. 1 (1968), reprinted at 115 Cong. Rec. 237, Jan. 6, 1969). Oklahoma legislated a pledge oath and a $1,000 fine within the year. Irwin himself was never punished.
Fifteen votes that look identical
This project’s own data carries the result of Irwin’s vote sitting beside two things that look exactly like it and are not. Byrd received 15 electoral votes for president in 1960, and the National Archives’ 1960 results table breaks them down by state:
| State | Byrd votes | State’s allotment |
|---|---|---|
| Alabama | 6 | 11 |
| Mississippi | 8 | 8 |
| Oklahoma | 1 | 8 |
Mississippi’s eight electors and six of Alabama’s eleven were unpledged. A handful of Southern states in that era, these two among them, let electors run under the party label without naming any candidate for president, so those fourteen were free to vote however they chose (Kirby, 27 Law & Contemp. Probs. 495 (1962) n.104; Gray v. Mississippi, 233 F. Supp. 139 (N.D. Miss. 1964)). Oklahoma’s slate was pledged, to Nixon, and Irwin alone broke it.
Nothing in those three rows says which is which. Six votes, eight votes, one vote, all cast for the same man, in a column that cannot by itself distinguish a lawful unpledged slate from a broken pledge. The distinction survives only outside the row: the 14 unpledged electors voted Byrd for president and Strom Thurmond for vice president, while Irwin alone voted Byrd and Goldwater. That vice-presidential vote is not in this project’s own data, which tracks the presidential line only; it is on the National Archives’ page.
Congress drew the same line eight years later, on the floor, debating a different faithless elector. Senator Church put the general rule to Senator Muskie directly: “If Dr. Bailey had been unpledged… there would be no basis for objecting.” Muskie responded, “The Senator is correct” (115 Cong. Rec. 214, Jan. 6, 1969). It is the whole premise of this series. A record can hold fifteen identical-looking votes and still not tell you, on its own, that fourteen were routine and one was a plan to change who became president.
Nobody else was trying to change the result
Outside 1960 and 2016, no faithless elector or abstainer since 1948 was trying to change who became president.
| Year | Elector (state) | Vote | What the record shows |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1948 | Preston Parks (TN) | Strom Thurmond | Had said in advance that he would vote for Thurmond |
| 1956 | W. F. Turner (AL) | Walter B. Jones | A segregationist protest against the party’s nominee, in his own words |
| 1972 | Roger MacBride (VA) | John Hospers / Tonie Nathan | Cast his vote for the fledgling Libertarian ticket instead of Nixon |
| 1976 | Mike Padden (WA) | Ronald Reagan | A single-issue protest; Washington had no pledge law until the following year |
| 1988 | Margarette Leach (WV) | reversed her own ticket’s order | A protest of elector discretion itself, not of either candidate |
| 2000 | Barbara Lett-Simmons (DC) | left her ballot blank | Already told in this series |
| 2004 | One elector (MN) | John Edwards | Voted for the Democratic running mate for both President and Vice President |
Turner’s is the one case a shortened quote would misrepresent. Reporting his vote, the AP quoted him in full (Evening Star, Dec. 18, 1956, p. 5): “I have fulfilled my obligations to the people of Alabama. I’m talking about the white people.” The first sentence alone reads like routine constituent service. The second says which people he meant.
Has it ever mattered
None of these votes, and neither organized attempt, ever came within reach of changing an outcome. The arithmetic explains why, and also why anyone would try in the first place.
| Year | Winner (electoral votes) | Cushion over the majority | Defections needed to deny a majority |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1876 | Hayes, 185 of 369 | 0 | 1 |
| 2000 | Bush, 271 of 538 | 1 | 2 |
| 1960 | Kennedy, 303 of 537 | 34 | 35 |
| 2016 | Trump, 306 pledged of 538 | 36 | 37 |
One or two electors, protesting or not, could erase a cushion of zero or one on their own; neither 1876 nor 2000 saw a defection large enough to test it. A cushion in the thirties is a different story, and the only two organized attempts on record both landed in years shaped that way. Both plans needed dozens of people to move together. Neither could recruit more than a handful.
The Supreme Court looked at the whole record and found the same pattern at scale: “since the founding, electors have cast some 180 faithless votes… that is 180 out of over 23,000. And more than a third of the faithless votes come from 1872, when the Democratic Party’s nominee (Horace Greeley) died just after Election Day,” a story this series has already told. “Putting those aside, faithless votes represent just one-half of one percent of the total… because faithless votes have never come close to affecting an outcome, only one has ever been challenged. True enough, that one was counted” (Chiafalo, slip op. at 16-17).
Two of the protest voters answered the harder question themselves. Mike Padden, interviewed decades later: “I was using my vote as a protest vote… but it was not going to ever be at the expense of the election itself… had that happened, I would have voted for Ford.” Margarette Leach, the same interview: “I don’t think I would’ve had the courage to take the presidency away from anybody” (both, New York Times Magazine, Dec. 17, 2000).
The one time the count was tested
Only once has a faithless vote actually been challenged when Congress counted it. On December 16, 1968, Dr. Lloyd W. Bailey, a Nixon-pledged elector from Rocky Mount, North Carolina, voted for George Wallace and Curtis LeMay instead. North Carolina had no binding statute; Bailey broke no state law. In a written statement dated the day he voted, which Senator Sam Ervin entered into the record when Congress counted on January 6, 1969, he gave his reasons: “as an Elector it is my duty to place loyalty to my country before loyalty to my political party.” The Electoral College, he wrote, “is one part of the system of checks and balances which guarantees that the minority voice can be heard,” and, “in view of the fact that Mr. Wallace polled 46.1% of the vote in my district, I find that I cannot support Mr. Nixon until he gives definite evidence that he intends to make the changes which the people are demanding” (115 Cong. Rec. 205, Jan. 6, 1969).
Representative James G. O’Hara and Senator Edmund S. Muskie objected, joined by 37 more House members and 6 more senators. Muskie had been Hubert Humphrey’s running mate that November; the vote he was objecting to had been taken from the ticket that beat them. The argument was specific: that Bailey’s vote had not been “regularly given,” under the law then in force, not that his certification was defective. Vice President Humphrey would ordinarily have presided over the count; he was abroad, at the funeral of Trygve Lie, the first UN Secretary-General, so Senate President pro tempore Richard Russell ran the session. Representative Gerald Ford moved to table the objection outright; Speaker John McCormack ruled the motion out of order, since the statute then in force commanded the chair to put the question without further debate.
Both chambers rejected the objection: the House 228 to 170, the Senate 58 to 33. Bailey’s vote counted. That year’s final tally read Nixon 301, Humphrey 191, Wallace 46, the 46 including Bailey’s own. Since the Electoral Count Act of 1887, only four objections to a state’s electoral votes have ever reached a floor vote at all, in 1969, 2005, and twice in 2021. 1969 remains the only one aimed at a faithless elector.
It could not happen the same way today. 3 U.S.C. §15(d)(2)(B)(i)(II) now requires one-fifth of each chamber to sign an objection before it can even be considered, roughly 87 representatives and 20 senators. The O’Hara-Muskie objection, with 38 House members and 7 senators behind it, would not clear that bar.
What changed
Chiafalo answered a question the Court had left open since 1952. In Ray v. Blair, it had upheld a state’s power to require the pledge in the first place, but explicitly declined to decide whether a state could enforce it with a penalty if an elector broke it. Sixty-eight years and one more attempt to throw a US presidential election into the House later, the Court answered: yes, a state may enforce an elector’s pledge.
Washington itself no longer answers that question the way it did in 2016. A footnote in Chiafalo notes the change: “Since the events in this case, Washington has repealed the fine. It now enforces pledges only by removing and replacing faithless electors.” Under the statute now in force, a ballot marked against the elector’s pledge is not counted, the elector who presents it vacates the office, and a substitute elector fills the seat and votes instead (Wash. Rev. Code §29A.56.090(3) (2019)). If Chiafalo, Guerra, and John tried the same thing today, Washington would refuse to count their ballots and replace them, and the National Archives’ notes on the state would carry no Colin Powell entry.
Drafted with Claude Code. The ideas, claims, and any errors are mine.
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