4
CHIAFALO v. WASHINGTON
Opinion of the Court
“The Electors shall meet in their respective states and
vote by ballot for President and Vice-President . . .;
they shall name in their ballots the person voted for as
President, and in distinct ballots the person voted for
as Vice-President, and they shall make distinct lists of
all persons voted for as President, and of all persons
voted for as Vice-President, and of the number of votes
for each, which lists they shall sign and certify, and
transmit sealed to [Congress, where] the votes shall
then be counted.”
The Amendment thus brought the Electoral College’s voting procedures into line with the Nation’s new party system.
Within a few decades, the party system also became the
means of translating popular preferences within each State
into Electoral College ballots. In the Nation’s earliest elections, state legislatures mostly picked the electors, with the
majority party sending a delegation of its choice to the Electoral College. By 1832, though, all States but one had introduced popular presidential elections. See Peirce &
Longley, The People’s President, at 45. At first, citizens
voted for a slate of electors put forward by a political party,
expecting that the winning slate would vote for its party’s
presidential (and vice presidential) nominee in the Electoral College. By the early 20th century, citizens in most
States voted for the presidential candidate himself; ballots
increasingly did not even list the electors. See Albright,
The Presidential Short Ballot, 34 Am. Pol. Sci. Rev. 955,
955–957 (1940). After the popular vote was counted, States
appointed the electors chosen by the party whose presidential nominee had won statewide, again expecting that they
would vote for that candidate in the Electoral College.1
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1 Maine and Nebraska (which, for simplicity’s sake, we will ignore after
this footnote) developed a more complicated system in which two electors
go to the winner of the statewide vote and one goes to the winner of each