# Faithless Elector A **faithless elector** is a presidential elector who casts a ballot for someone other than the candidate they were appointed to support. The Constitution says nothing about pledges — it simply directs electors to "vote by ballot" — so the practice has always been formally possible, and it has happened in scattered numbers throughout American history, most conspicuously with seven defections in 2016. The question of whether a state may *punish* or *replace* such an elector was settled in [[Chiafalo v. Washington]] (2020), which upheld state pledge-enforcement laws unanimously. That decision largely closed faithless electors as a realistic route to overturning a result — which is why the 2020 effort ran instead through fraudulent slates and the counting procedure rather than through individual defectors. See [[Electoral College Process Flow]]. This is a stub — expand with the historical tally by cycle and the state-by-state enforcement regimes. ## See Also - [[Electoral College Process Flow]] - [[Chiafalo v. Washington]] - [[Certificate of Vote]] - [[Electoral College]]