But that’s not the case, as the district gets three Electoral College voters, which is one per 224,076 residents, a much more favorable ratio than Florida’s.
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These are Florida (29 electoral votes), OH (18), MI (16), Pennsylvania (20), New Hampshire (4), Maine’s second congressional district (1), ME (2), North Carolina (15), Georgia (16), Colorado (9), Nevada (6), Arizona (11), New Mexico (5) and Iowa (6). The winning electors then meet in December within the confines of their designated states, and they officially cast their final and confirmed vote for president and vice-president.
United States citizens do not directly elect the president, instead they elect representatives called “electors” who, together, form the “electoral college”. That scenario assumes Florida and its 29 electoral votes go to Clinton. Why 538? It’s the combination the country’s 435 representatives, 100 senators, and the 3 electors allocated to the District of Columbia. Washington DC, which has no representation in Congress, has three members, the same as the smallest states. The 12th Amendment implies only electoral college votes matter in determining the top three.
Are there restrictions on who the Elector can vote for? The number of electors from each state is equal to the number of congressional seats the state has in the House and Senate.
Once the popular vote is over, the victorious electors convene separately in each state and vote.
All but two states – ME and Nebraska – follow a “winner take all” method. Nebraska and ME use the congressional district system. And the bigger the margin of electoral votes, the more hard it becomes for the losing candidate to try to contest the overall result.
ME has two districts, so its vote can be split 3-1 (as it appears likely to be this year).
The election would then pivot on Florida and the possibility that Maine’s second congressional district could send its one electoral vote, under that state’s election system, to Trump instead of Clinton.
Based on the two-party preferred result from that election, however, the Liberal/National presidential ticket receives a greater number of votes, meaning all of the state’s 59 electoral college votes – calculated from its 47 lower house and 12 upper house seats – are given to party delegates. In 2008, for instance, Republican John McCain won four out of Nebraska’s five electoral votes, with Democrat Barack Obama receiving one vote. While incredibly rare, Faithless Electors can stumble a presidential candidacy by crossing the aisle and voting for the opposite party. “So our ballot doesn’t list the names of the candidates but the ballot does say ‘electors for”, the agency quoted Kidd to have said. While that is the only contemporary example, this also happened in 1888 and 1876.
If the election is close enough, it’s at least conceivable that dead-end Berners could stage one last crippling protest.
However, “the U.S. Supreme Court has held that the Constitution does not require that Electors be completely free to act as they choose” either, the National Archives reports.
People who vote for someone other than for whom they are pledged are known as “faithless electors” and they’ve never decided a presidential election.
The popular election-tracking site Real Clear Politics compiles polling data into averages by state and projects possible Electoral College outcomes.
This unlikely situation occurred in 1800 when a tie-breaking vote by the House chose Thomas Jefferson as president over Aaron Burr, who became his vice president. With Arizona in the Trump column, he’d be at 215 electoral votes. Each state has the same number of electors as representatives in the House and the Senate.
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In 1824, Andrew Jackson had the most votes with 99, but 131 were needed to win.
