Chiafalo v. Washington, , 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 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, , 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.
Background Faithless electors
In the United States Electoral College, faithless electors are those who either cast electoral votes for someone other than the candidate of the party for whom they pledged to vote or who abstain. Faithless electors are comparatively rare because electors are generally chosen among those who are already personally committed to a party and party's candidate. Thirty-three states plus the District of Columbia have passed laws to prevent faithless electors, but none had been enforced prior to 2016. In 1952, the constitutionality of state pledge laws was brought before the Supreme Court in Ray v. Blair, . The Court ruled in favor of state laws requiring electors to pledge to vote for the winning candidate in order to be certified as electors, as well as removing electors who refuse to pledge. The Court did not rule whether pledges were enforceable. Nevertheless, the Court also wrote:
In his dissent, Justice Robert H. Jackson, joined by Justice William O. Douglas, wrote:
State law For the 2016 election, Washington state law RCW 29A.56.320 required electors, selected by their party, to vote for the candidate of their party during the presidential election, or otherwise be subject to a civil penalty.
Under Colorado law, each presidential elector must vote for the presidential and vice-presidential candidates who received the highest number of votes in Colorado's general election.
Case history
In the 2016 presidential election, the major-party nominees were Hillary Clinton and her running mate Tim Kaine for the Democrats, and Donald Trump and his running mate Mike Pence for the Republicans. Trump eventually won the election with 304 electoral votes to become the 45th President of the United States. There was a grassroots effort to convince electors to vote their conscience in accordance with Alexander Hamilton's Federalist Paper No. 68 to try to sway electors to vote for an alternative Republican candidate, even if this were to violate their pledges, to deny Trump a majority in the electoral college and trigger a contingent election in the United States House of Representatives. While the defection of at least 37 Republican electors was needed to force a contingent election, there were only 2 who did not vote for Donald Trump; most of the faithless votes came from Democratic electors, several of whom also voted for alternative Republican candidates.
Washington The Democratic ticket of Clinton and Kaine won the popular vote in Washington, thus the slate of twelve Democratic electors were appointed. Four of these electors, who had signed pledges to vote for the Democratic nominee, voted for candidates other than Clinton/Kaine. Per the law, they were each fined. Three of the four electors, Peter Bret Chiafalo, Levi Guerra, and Esther John, challenged the fine as a violation of their constitutional rights, arguing that the state's authority over them as electors ended once they were appointed and they were free to vote as they chose under the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution. At an initial hearing, an administrative law judge upheld the fines, stating he had no jurisdiction to rule on constitutional arguments, only whether the fines were applied in accordance with state law. At the first trial at the Thurston County Superior Court in 2017, the judge ruled against the constitutional argument and deemed the fines permissible. The three electors then appealed to the Washington Supreme Court, which in May 2019 upheld the lower court ruling with an 8–1 vote. The majority opinion states that "The power of electors to vote comes from the State, and the elector has no personal right to that vote" to justify the fine. The lone dissent argues that the plenary power of the state to appoint electors may not be conflated with control over the electors once voting has begun, in line with Justice Jackson's concerns in Ray v. Blair.
Subsequently, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee signed a bill into law in May 2019 that changes the faithless elector law, such that should an elector fail to vote for the candidate of their party, the elector is removed from their position and a new elector is then appointed, rather than allowing the elector to vote faithlessly and be subject to fines after the fact. The new law is analogous to the law in question in the Colorado case.
On October 7, 2019, the three electors appealed their case to the United States Supreme Court.
Colorado Clinton and Kaine received the most votes in Colorado, a state allotted 9 electoral votes. Two Democratic electors in the 2016 election sought an injunction against the state's law after the results of the general election were tallied in early November 2016 but before the electoral college vote on December 19, 2016. The named plaintiff in the case was former Democratic state senator Polly Baca of Denver, who had indicated she would cast her vote for an alternative Republican candidate. The named defendant was John Hickenlooper, then the Governor of Colorado. They challenged Colorado's law on the basis of their constitutional rights under the Twelfth and Fourteenth Amendments, as well as the Supreme Court's prior ruling in Ray v. Blair that left open whether states can compel electors to vote as specified with penalties. On December 12, 2016, District Judge Wiley Daniel of the United States District Court for the District of Colorado denied the indicative petition, calling the case a "political stunt". Wayne Williams, then the Secretary of State of Colorado, stated that he would replace electors who failed to vote for Hillary Clinton.
The electors' appeal of the decision to the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit was denied on December 16, with the court stating the injunction "would undermine the electoral process and unduly prejudice the American people by prohibiting a successful transition of power". The court did not rule on the state's authority to remove an elector after voting, but declared in a footnote that any attempt to remove electors "after voting has begun" would be "unlikely in light of the text of the Twelfth Amendment".
While both electors ultimately voted for Clinton during the electoral college vote on December 19, a different elector, Micheal Baca (no relation to Polly), attempted to vote for John Kasich. Before voting for vice president, Williams declared his vote invalid under state law and replaced him with an alternate elector who voted for Clinton and Tim Kaine.
Micheal Baca and the two other electors then filed suit in a new case, Nemanich v. Williams, claiming "The Constitution does not expressly or implicitly give the states any power to restrict Electors' freedom beyond the 12th Amendment's single limitation." Later, the respondent was changed to the Colorado Department of State. On April 10, 2018, Judge Daniel granted the motion to dismiss the case on behalf of Colorado. The electors appealed to the Tenth Circuit, with oral arguments held in January 2019. Both sides filed a joint motion seeking the court to render a decision on the merits of the case, with Colorado claiming to waive immunity from suit. The court ruled in favor of the electors in a 2–1 vote in August 2019, agreeing that Baca's removal as an elector violated the Twelfth Amendment. The majority opinion, written by Circuit Judge Carolyn Baldwin McHugh and joined by Circuit Judge Jerome Holmes, stated that "The text of the Constitution makes clear that states do not have the constitutional authority to interfere with presidential electors who exercise their constitutional right to vote for the President and Vice President candidates of their choice." Circuit Judge Mary Beck Briscoe did not take a position on the merits of the case but dissented on mootness and standing grounds. The court did rule that only Micheal Baca had standing and officially remanded the case back to the district court. The ruling immediately invalidated faithless elector laws in states within the 10th Circuit, specifically in New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Wyoming.
Instead of seeking an en banc review at the Tenth Circuit, Colorado filed a petition for writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court on October 16, 2019. Colorado's petition identified the circuit split between the Tenth Circuit's decision and that of the Washington Supreme Court in Chiafalo, seeking the Supreme Court's involvement to resolve the split. Colorado's petition urged for an urgent resolution to the case, as the matter may impact the 2020 election.
Supreme Court On January 17, 2020, the Supreme Court agreed to hear both the Washington case and the Colorado case, Colorado Department of State v. Baca, 19-518, as a consolidated case, with Chiafalo v. Washington the lead case. Oral arguments were originally scheduled for April 28, 2020. However, on March 10, Justice Sonia Sotomayor announced that she would recuse herself from the Colorado case, citing her prior friendship with the respondent Polly Baca. As a separate result, the Supreme Court reversed the consolidation of the two cases in a decision that Sotomayor had no part in due to her connection to Baca. Oral arguments in both cases were rescheduled to be held via teleconference due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which occurred on May 13, 2020. Observers to the arguments for both cases believed the justices were concerned with the chaos that allowing faithless electors to vote how they wanted, or to be influenced by bribes, would have on the election process. Lawrence Lessig, representing the electors in the Washington case, argued that the Constitution does not give the authority to states to restrict how electors can vote, but several justices stated that the Constitution does not block states from such restrictions. In light of oral arguments, some legal scholars thought that the Court may overly weight the potential negative consequences of the constitutional provisions for electors and allow for their original meaning to be overridden.