Now, if I’m a Republican elector from Texas — with 38 electoral votes — reading this post, I’m thinking “why let Ohio decide this one”? And the reality is, if Texas’s Republican electors can coordinate on a candidate (Ted Cruz? Rick Perry?), then that candidate can beat Kasich.
At the extreme, every state delegation could end up coordinating on its own choice, in which case California, Texas, and New York or Florida (the four states with the most electoral votes) could end up picking the three candidates for president!
[Is it even constitutional for state laws to purport to bind their state electors?]
Of course, all of these scenarios depend on the question of the “faithless elector” — electors who would vote for someone other than the candidate that they were selected to represent by their state. In the history of the United States, there have been a sum total of 157 faithless electors. In the past 100 years, there has not been an election with more than a single faithless elector. Is it likely we’ll witness the rise of the faithless electors in 2016? I doubt it. But is it any more likely than having multiple state delegations in the House of Representatives vote for a presidential candidate that only won the state of Utah? Maybe not, but it has been a strange year so far.
The bottom line is that if we’re going to start looking at unlikely but legal scenarios, the Constitution allows for an awful lot of them. And as a result, Evan McMullin’s path to the presidency may be even more limited than Morris suggested.
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