The 1812 United States presidential election was the seventh quadrennial presidential election. It was held from Friday, October 30, 1812, to Wednesday, December 2, 1812. Taking place in the shadow of the War of 1812, incumbent Democratic-Republican President James Madison defeated DeWitt Clinton, the Lieutenant Governor of New York and Mayor of New York City, who drew support from dissident Democratic-Republicans in the North as well as Federalists. It was the first presidential election to be held during a major war involving the United States.
Lester Lawrence Lessig III is an American legal scholar and political activist. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. He is the founder of Creative Commons and of Equal Citizens. Lessig was a candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination for president of the United States in the 2016 U.S. presidential election but withdrew before the primaries.
In the United States, the Electoral College is the group of presidential electors that is formed every four years for the sole purpose of voting for the president and vice president. The process is described in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. Each state appoints electors using legal procedures determined by its legislature, equal in number to its congressional delegation totaling 535 electors. A 1961 amendment granted the federal District of Columbia three electors. Of the current 538 electors, a simple majority of 270 or more electoral votes is required to elect the president and vice president. If no candidate achieves a majority there, a contingent election is held by the House of Representatives to elect the president and by the Senate to elect the vice president. Federal office holders, including senators and representatives, cannot be electors.
In United States presidential elections, an unpledged elector is a person nominated to stand as an elector but who has not pledged to support any particular presidential or vice presidential candidate, and is free to vote for any candidate when elected a member of the Electoral College. Presidential elections are indirect, with voters in each state choosing electors on Election Day in November, and these electors choosing the president and vice president of the United States in December. Electors in practice have since the 19th century almost always agreed in advance to vote for a particular candidate — that is, they are said to have been pledged to that candidate. In several elections in the 20th century, however, competitive campaigns were mounted by candidates who made no pledge to any presidential nominee before the election. These anomalies largely arose from fissures within the Democratic Party over the issues of civil rights and segregation. No serious general election campaign has been mounted to elect unpledged electors in any state since 1964.
In the United States Electoral College, a faithless elector is an elector who does not vote for the candidates for U.S. President and U.S. Vice President for whom the elector had pledged to vote, and instead votes for another person for one or both offices or abstains from voting. As part of United States presidential elections, each state selects the method by which its electors are to be selected, which in modern times has been based on a popular vote in most states, and generally requires its electors to have pledged to vote for the candidates of their party if appointed. A pledged elector is only considered a faithless elector by breaking their pledge; unpledged electors have no pledge to break. The consequences of an elector voting in a way inconsistent with their pledge vary from state to state.
The Electoral Commission, sometimes referred to as the Hayes-Tilden or Tilden-Hayes Electoral Commission, was a temporary body created by the United States Congress on January 29, 1877, to resolve the disputed United States presidential election of 1876. Democrat Samuel J. Tilden and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes were the main contenders in the election. Tilden won 184 undisputed electoral votes, one vote shy of the 185 needed to win, to Hayes' 165, with 20 electoral votes from four states unresolved. Both Tilden and Hayes electors submitted votes from these states, and each claimed victory.
The election of the president and the vice president of the United States is an indirect election in which citizens of the United States who are registered to vote in one of the fifty U.S. states or in Washington, D.C., cast ballots not directly for those offices, but instead for members of the Electoral College. These electors then cast direct votes, known as electoral votes, for president, and for vice president. The candidate who receives an absolute majority of electoral votes is then elected to that office. If no candidate receives an absolute majority of the votes for president, the House of Representatives elects the president; likewise if no one receives an absolute majority of the votes for vice president, then the Senate elects the vice president.
Following is a table of United States presidential elections in Alabama, ordered by year. Since its admission to statehood in 1819, Alabama has participated in every U.S. presidential election except the election of 1864, during the American Civil War, when the state had seceded to join the Confederacy.
Following is a table of United States presidential elections in Colorado, ordered by year. Since its admission to statehood in 1876, Colorado has participated in every U.S. presidential election.
Following is a table of United States presidential elections in Delaware, ordered by year. Since its admission to statehood in 1787, Delaware has participated in every U.S. presidential election.
Following is a table of United States presidential elections in Indiana, ordered by year. Since its admission to statehood in 1816, Indiana has participated in every U.S. presidential election.
Following is a table of United States presidential elections in Louisiana, ordered by year. Since its admission to statehood in 1812, Louisiana has participated in every U.S. presidential election except the election of 1864, during the American Civil War. At that time, Louisiana was controlled by the Union and held elections, but electors were not ultimately counted.
Following is a table of United States presidential elections in New York, ordered by year. Since its admission to statehood in 1788, New York has participated in every U.S. presidential election except the election of 1788–1789, when it failed to appoint its allotment of eight electors because of a deadlock in the state legislature.
Following is a table of United States presidential elections in South Carolina, ordered by year. Since its admission to statehood in 1788, South Carolina has participated in every U.S. presidential election except the election of 1864 during the American Civil War, when the state had seceded to join the Confederacy.
In the 2016 United States presidential election, ten members of the Electoral College voted or attempted to vote for a candidate different from the ones to whom they were pledged. Three of these votes were invalidated under the faithless elector laws of their respective states, and the elector either subsequently voted for the pledged candidate or was replaced by someone who did. Although there had been a combined total of 155 instances of individual electors voting faithlessly prior to 2016 in over two centuries of previous US presidential elections, 2016 was the first election in over a hundred years in which multiple electors worked to alter the result of the election.
Equal Citizens is an American non-profit, non-partisan group that is "dedicated to reforms that will achieve citizen equality". It was founded in late 2016 by Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig to continue the effort to bring about the set of reforms he proposed during his 2016 presidential campaign. Notably, as its inaugural campaign, the group launched "Electors Trust" immediately after the 2016 general election. They did this to provide free and strictly confidential legal support to any elector who wished to vote their conscience. Working together with several other groups, such as the Hamilton Electors and celebrities, the campaign resulted in the largest number of "faithless" electoral votes ever cast in a single presidential election.
Chiafalo v. Washington, 591 U.S. ___ (2020), was a United States Supreme Court case on the issue of "faithless electors" in the Electoral College stemming from the 2016 United States presidential election. The Court ruled unanimously, by a vote of 9–0, that states have the ability to enforce an elector's pledge in presidential elections. Chiafalo deals with electors who received US$1,000 fines for not voting for the nominees of their party in the state of Washington. The case was originally consolidated with Colorado Department of State v. Baca, 591 U.S. ___ (2020), a similar case based on a challenge to a Colorado law providing for the removal and replacement of an elector who does not vote for the presidential candidate who received the most votes in the state, with the electors claiming they have discretion to vote as they choose under the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution. On March 10, 2020, Justice Sonia Sotomayor recused herself in the Colorado case due to a prior relationship to a respondent, and the cases were decided separately on July 6, 2020. Baca was a per curiam decision that followed from the unanimous ruling in Chiafalo against the faithless electors and in favor of the state.
The Eastman memos, also known as the "coup memo", are documents by John Eastman, an American law professor retained by then-President Donald Trump advancing the fringe legal theory that a U.S. Vice President has unilateral authority to reject certified State electors. This would have the effect of nullifying an election in order to produce an outcome personally desired by the Vice President, such as a result in the Vice President's own party's favor, including retaining himself as Vice President, or if the Vice President is himself the presidential candidate, then to unilaterally make himself president.
