This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, November 25th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown. These days the Electoral College is largely presented as a massive,

unwieldy obstacle to more democracy.

So how has it worked historically and who were the people who went rogue and became what I like

to call conscientious electors?

Emily Conrad is author of a new book, The Faithless, the Untold Story of the Electoral College.

In 2016, I believe it was October 2016, I was in Utah for a Cato Institute event and I had a chance to sit down with Senator Mike Lee of Utah about the Electoral College and of course he's a

former prosecutor himself somebody who's studied the Constitution extensively and I asked him what prevents

an elector in the Electoral College from deciding I don't care what the state legislature said I don't care what voters told the state

legislature to do I'm going to vote for somebody else when I go to Washington DC and put in my vote with the Electoral College and he said

absolutely nothing. I mean he didn't say nothing he said the words

absolutely nothing and so it we've had a Supreme Court case more

recently that says states may punish so-called rogue electors I'd like to think of them as conscientious electors. But all this goes to the

core as you were saying before we even started recording, most Americans at the most basic

level do not understand what their votes for president actually mean, what substantial impact they actually have.

Why is that a problem?

Well, it's a problem because we have the system in place.

And the rules of the system are, in my view, they're actually quite clear.

Now, unfortunately, they differ from state to state. The

Electoral College differs state to state which makes it slightly difficult as a

researcher to really say this is what the Electoral College is. But at the end of the day

everybody's experience and every voter's experience in the United States is

...