This is the Cater Daily Podcast for Wednesday, July 8th, 2020. I'm

Caleb Brown. The Supreme Court says it's constitutional for states to punish

electoral college voters for going rogue, for being

rogue, for being faithless, for being conscientious electors.

Cato's Walter Olson comments on the decision and provides some of the

background of what it means for an elector to go against the will of voters.

This term faithless electors. I don't like it.

Well, it pre-judges part of what was up in the air, which is when someone is elected for, as an elector for a presidential ticket, and then they vote for someone else, should we admire what they do or should we blame them and

faithless electives kind of pre-judges which way that should come up.

So the term I prefer is conscientious electors.

Well, that does the same thing in reverse.

But the court tried not to get into the personal moral issues of whether or not you should

behave that way in favor of the history and the constitutional structure.

So what tells us, what tells us that an elector may be constrained in his or her ability to make a choice other than the one chosen by the state legislature

and by extension the voters to whom the state legislature has delegated the decision.

We've got several sources of possible obligation here and of course in the direct cases from Washington and

Colorado that the court decided the state legislature had passed bills

saying if you were going to run on the slate then you have to vote for the committed candidate.

And the question is, is that kind of state law not only valid.

And the court back in the 1950s

had heard a case about the pledge in Alabama that they were required to sign.

So that had already brought up the general issue of whether it's okay to take away their

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