88 Politics and elections
popular election. Today the Electors are chosen by popular vote in November,
but in law it is still the Electoral College that makes the final decision in De-
cember. Strictly speaking, when Americans cast their vote for president they
are really choosing between competing lists, or slates, of Electoral College
candidates, although today it is the names of the candidates for the presi-
dential office which appear on the ballot papers, rather than the names of
the candidates for the Electoral College. The continuing importance of this
eighteenth-century institution was dramatically demonstrated in the elec-
tion of 2000 when the outcome of the election was determined by the votes of
the Electoral College, not the votes of the American electorate.
Of course, the idea that the members of the Electoral College could qui-
etly and calmly choose a president according to their best judgement was a
delusion. The mechanisms of organised politics soon entered into the proc-
ess, and the candidates for the Electoral College soon became pledged to
cast their votes for one of the contenders for the presidency. The members
of the Electoral College thus ceased to exercise any individual judgement
and merely registered the decision of the voters in their state. The Electoral
College does not even meet to deliberate as a body – the members meet in
the state capitals and their votes are carried to Washington.
It is true that the operation of the Electoral College is not yet quite a
formality. Occasionally individual Electors have changed their minds after
the November election and refused to cast their votes for the candidate to
whom they were pledged. In 1948 a Tennessee Elector refused to cast his vote
for President Truman, although the latter had carried the state, and cast his
vote instead for the States’ Rights candidate. In 1956 an Alabama Elector
refused to vote for Stevenson, to whom he had been committed, and in 1960
an Elector in Oklahoma pledged to support Richard Nixon cast his vote for
Senator Byrd. In 1968 a North Carolina Elector switched his vote from Nixon
to George Wallace. In 2000 one Elector committed to Al Gore abstained from
voting and in 2004, one Elector from Minnesota who was pledged to support
John Kerry in fact voted for John Edwards for president
These minor deviations from the normal practice have made no difference
to the working of the Electoral College, but the strategy adopted in certain
Southern states in the past had potentially a more important effect. In 1960,
as an alternative to setting up a dissident third party, Democrats in Alabama
and Mississippi who were opposed to the official candidate, John F. Kennedy,
put up an unpledged slate of candidates for the Electoral College. This was
in a sense a reversion to the earlier ideas of the Founding Fathers, for it was
intended that these Electors should not be committed to one candidate or
another, but should be free to choose according to the outcome of the election
in other states. If it was a very close election in terms of Electoral votes, these
uncommitted Electors could tip the balance in favour of one candidate or
another in return for concessions to the Southern point of view, or they could
throw the election into the House of Representatives (see below). Although
it was a close election in terms of the popular vote, Kennedy had a good