Word: electors
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...Twenty-six states have no requirement that electors vote in accordance with the popular vote. Nineteen states and D.C. mandate that they vote in accordance with the popular vote, but there's no penalty if an elector fails to do so. Only five states have penalties for deviating from the popular vote. But in most of those states, the sanctions are relatively minor--in Oklahoma, for instance, it's a $1,000 fine. Of the states that are currently in some dispute, Florida, Iowa and New Hampshire don't try to bind their electors; Wisconsin, New Mexico and Oregon...
...States decide how they're chosen, but usually they are loyalists chosen by their parties. Five hundred and thirty-eight electoral votes are distributed among the states--one for each member of the House and Senate. (The District of Columbia gets three.) An elector is chosen for every electoral vote available to a state. Electors can't hold federal office. Some celebrities have been electors, like Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King Jr.'s widow. This year they include the Florida attorney general, a retired school administrator in Ohio and a computer specialist in Arizona...
There is a simpler reform that would ensure the popular-vote winner a majority in the Electoral College: award a bonus of 102 electoral votes, two for each state and for the District of Columbia, to the winner of the popular vote. Under this reform, there would remain a temptation to bring moral pressure on individual electors to reject the decisions of their states and shift their votes to the popular-vote winners. This invokes the myth that the Founding Fathers expected the electors to be free agents. The evidence is that the Founders fully expected the Electoral College...
...need a Constitutional amendment to avoid another mess like Tuesday's, but it's unfair to blame the architects of the U.S. Constitution. They simply put the framework of an Electoral College into being, specifying that each state would choose an elector for each of its U.S. Senators and members of Congress. The rest was left to Congress and the states, and when the national party systems took shape in the 1820s, the states began to have voters choose party slates of electors when they voted for President. Most electoral-vote results became winner-take-all outcomes, which they remain...
...there an actual ballot for each elector, or do you just raise your hands to vote...