Faithless electors in the United States presidential election, 2016

In the 2016 United States presidential election, seven members of the U.S. Electoral College voted for a different candidate than whom they were pledged to vote. The Democratic Party nominee, Hillary Clinton, lost five of her pledged electors while the Republican Party nominee and then president-elect, Donald Trump, lost two. Three of the faithless electors voted for Colin Powell while John Kasich, Ron Paul, Bernie Sanders, and Faith Spotted Eagle each received one vote.

Three additional electors initially voted against their Clinton pledge but had their votes invalidated according to local statutes, so they were replaced or forced to vote again. The defections fell well short of the number needed to change the result of the election; only two of the seven defected from the presumptive winner, when 37 were needed to change the outcome.

Although there had been a combined total of 157 instances of individual electors voting faithlessly in over two centuries of previous US presidential elections, 2016 was a year in which multiple groups of electors worked to alter the result of the election in order to "vote their conscience for the good of America" in accordance with Alexander Hamilton's Federalist Paper No. 68. 2016 was also the first year since 1960 when one of the electors actively worked to change the election. Electors were subjected to public pressure, up to and including death threats.

Seven electors successfully cast faithless ballots for president, the most to defect from presidential candidates who were still alive in Electoral College history, surpassing the six electors who defected from James Madison in the 1808 election. Historically, this number of defections has been exceeded only in cases where the presidential candidate was no longer living at the time the electors cast their ballots: the seven faithless presidential votes in 2016 falls well short of the record set in 1872, when 63 of 66 electors originally pledged to losing candidate Horace Greeley cast their votes for someone else (Greeley had died between election day and the meeting of the Electoral College). The six faithless vice-presidential votes in 2016 is also short of the record for that office, without considering whether the vice-presidential candidates were still living, as multiple previous elections have had more than six faithless vice-presidential votes; in 1836, faithless electors successfully moved the vice-presidential decision to the U.S. Senate.

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