10 CHIAFALO v. WASHINGTON Opinion of the Court ballot for his party’s presidential nominee, thus tracking the State’s popular vote. See Ray, 343 U. S., at 227 (A pledge requirement “is an exercise of the state’s right to appoint electors in such manner” as it chooses). Or—so long as nothing else in the Constitution poses an obstacle—a State can add, as Washington did, an associated condition of appointment: It can demand that the elector actually live up to his pledge, on pain of penalty. Which is to say that the State’s appointment power, barring some outside constraint, enables the enforcement of a pledge like Washington’s.6 And nothing in the Constitution expressly prohibits States from taking away presidential electors’ voting discretion as Washington does. The Constitution is barebones about electors. Article II includes only the instruction to each State to appoint, in whatever way it likes, as many electors as it has Senators and Representatives (except that the State may not appoint members of the Federal Government). The Twelfth Amendment then tells electors to meet in their States, to vote for President and Vice President separately, and to transmit lists of all their votes to the President of the United States Senate for counting. Appointments and procedures and . . . that is all. See id., at 225. The Framers could have done it differently; other constitutional drafters of their time did. In the founding era, two —————— 6 The concurring opinion would have us make fine distinctions among state laws punishing faithless voting—treating some as conditions of appointment and others not, depending on small semantic differences. See post, at 6–9 (distinguishing, for example, between Oklahoma’s law fining an elector for violating his oath (to vote for his party’s candidate) and Washington’s law fining an elector for not voting for his party’s candidate (whom he took an oath to support)). The Electors themselves raised no such argument, and they were right not to do so. No matter the precise phrasing, a law penalizing faithless voting (like a law merely barring that practice) is an exercise of the State’s power to impose conditions on the appointment of electors. See Ray v. Blair, 343 U. S. 154, 227 (1952).