Chiafalo v. Washington
The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that states can legally force presidential electors to vote for the candidate their state's voters picked, and can back that up with real penalties like fines or removal from office.
The decision settles a long-open question about the Electoral College: electors are not free agents who can substitute their own judgment for the public's — states have broad authority to hold them to their promises.
How it got here: Washington's Superior Court and Supreme Court both upheld the fines; separately, the Tenth Circuit ruled in a parallel Colorado case that states cannot remove faithless electors; the Supreme Court agreed to hear both cases to resolve the conflict.
The Case in Depth
What happened
When Washington State's voters chose Hillary Clinton for president in 2016, three Democratic Party electors who were pledged to support her secretly coordinated to cast their Electoral College votes for Colin Powell instead, hoping to deny Donald Trump a majority and push the election to the House of Representatives. Washington fined each elector $1,000 under its law penalizing faithless Electoral College votes. The three electors argued the Constitution gives them an unfettered right to vote however they please.
The question before the Court
Can a state fine or remove a presidential elector who breaks a pledge and votes for a different candidate than the one the state's voters chose?
The Court's answer
Yes — states can require electors to vote as they pledged and can enforce that requirement through penalties like fines or removal. Washington's law fining electors $1,000 for breaking their pledges is constitutional.
The Court grounded this in Article II, §1, which gives states sweeping authority to appoint electors "in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct." That power to appoint includes the power to set conditions on the appointment — such as requiring a pledge to vote for the state's popular-vote winner — and then enforcing that pledge through sanctions. Neither the Constitution's text nor two centuries of electoral practice supports the idea that electors hold an independent constitutional right to vote as they personally choose; from the country's earliest elections, electors were understood to be agents of the voters, not independent deliberators.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Fifteen states already have laws that fine or remove so-called faithless electors, and this ruling confirms those laws are constitutional. In a close presidential election where a small number of rogue electors might otherwise swing the outcome, states can now confidently enforce elector pledges without fear of a successful legal challenge.
What changes now
The three Washington electors' $1,000 fines stand. (Washington has since updated its law to remove faithless electors and replace them rather than impose a fine, but the constitutional principle is the same.) States with pledge-enforcement laws — currently about 15 — can now apply them with confidence. A companion case involving a Colorado faithless elector (Baca v. Colorado), in which the Tenth Circuit had reached the opposite conclusion, was decided the same day consistent with this ruling.
What this does not decide
The Court explicitly noted that its ruling should not be read to allow states to bind electors to vote for a candidate who has died between Election Day and the Electoral College vote. That scenario was not before the Court, and some states already carve out exceptions for deceased candidates.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Thomas
Justice Thomas agreed that states can require electors to vote for the people's choice, but disagreed with the majority's constitutional foundation. Rather than rooting the power in Article II's appointments language — which he argued merely imposes a duty on states to set the manner of appointment, not a broad grant of power to regulate how electors vote — Thomas would rely on the Tenth Amendment's principle that powers not delegated to the federal government and not prohibited to the states belong to the states. Because the Constitution says nothing about binding elector votes, states simply retain that power by default.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- Article II, §1 grants states the 'broadest power of determination' over who becomes a presidential elector — the Court quoted its own 1892 decision, McPherson v. Blacker, for that principle. Crucially, the power to appoint someone to a position also includes the power to attach conditions to that appointment, provided nothing else in the Constitution blocks those conditions.
- One permissible condition, already settled by Ray v. Blair (1952), is requiring an elector to pledge in advance to vote for the party's presidential nominee. The Court extended that logic: if a state can demand the pledge, it can also enforce the pledge — fining or replacing an elector who breaks it is simply another condition attached to the appointment.
- The Constitution's text offers no barrier. Article II says only that states shall appoint electors; the Twelfth Amendment says only that electors shall meet, vote by ballot for President and Vice President, and transmit their lists to Congress. Neither provision expressly grants electors independent voting discretion. The words 'electors,' 'vote,' and 'ballot' do not inherently require freedom of choice — a person can 'vote' by following instructions rather than exercising personal judgment.
- The nation's historical practice powerfully reinforces the non-discretionary model. In the very first contested presidential election in 1796, electors were already understood to be instruments for expressing their party's or selectors' preference, not independent deliberators. The Twelfth Amendment (1804) itself cemented party-line voting by letting electors cast separate ballots for President and Vice President, making the party-ticket system work cleanly.
- Faithless votes are historically rare — roughly 180 out of more than 23,000 total electoral votes cast, and more than a third of those came from 1872 when the Democratic nominee died just after Election Day. This thin record cannot establish a constitutional tradition of elector independence. Washington's penalty law fits squarely within a practice, more than two centuries old, of treating electors as agents of the voters rather than free agents.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Ray v. Blair (343 U.S. 214)
Ray's holding that pledge requirements are constitutional is reaffirmed, and extended to cover penalties for breaking those pledges.