Can the electors vote for McCain?

There are laws on the books in many state to punish faithless electors, but it doesn’t really matter—McCain conceded the race to Obama in his speech.

You can read about faithless electors here.

Empress, you have it backwards.

If the electors were faithless and voted for McCain instead of Obama – McCain would be the President-elect, regardless of the fact that he made a concession speech.

The president is chosen by the electoral vote, not by a speech.

Bottom line, faithless electors CAN defect, but in any given Presidential election it’s never been more than one or two (don’t even know if it’s ever been two), and I could be wrong, that’s just what I remember off the top of my head. But even though the final results aren’t in for Missouri and North Carolina, Obama has a pretty big lead in NC with 100% of precincts reporting and by all accounts if anything his lead will grow…given that and based on pre-election polling, we could probably give him NC as well, but let’s for the sake of argument say it goes to McCain. Same with Missouri, here McCain is ahead, it could still change, but let’s say with Indiana being given to Obama yesterday, Obama has 349 electoral votes. My point is that Obama will end up with 349, 360, 364 or 375 Electoral votes. Let’s say it’s only 349, that means that you need 270 to win, 269 to tie, 268 to lose. Effectively then, even if Obama loses NC and MO, 81 electors would have to defect.

Not going to happen.

Well put and well explained, dale.

I thought that if he conceded he was out of the race. Isn’t that the entire point of conceding?

Dale, check the article on faithless electors. Virginia was once faithless. It has never changed the outcome, but all of VA’s 23 electors chose to be faithless together once.

No, the point of conceding is to say “Yup, you won. I lost. Well that sucks.”

In 2000, Bush outright said (before we knew what was about to happen) that if Gore won by just a few electors, he’d actively campaign those electors to switch sides. Of course once the election happened, he acted like Gore was being unamerican by asking for a recount.

One would have to think that if one could even find 83 faithless electors who would go blue to red, you should be able to find 2 more who’d go red to blue. McCain’s not going to try to peel off electors…this was a mandate and there’s simply no reasonable justification for anyone to do this.

The AP just called NC for Obama, so it’s going to either be 364 or 375, meaning 96 or 107 electors at minimum (more than 25% of all blue electors) would have to be faithless.

And we pick our electors verrrrry carefully.

BREAKING NEWS:

Add one more to that potential pile, making Obama’s possible out comes 364, 365, 375 and 376. This is because Nebraska allocates it’s delegates by Congressional district. The district that includes Omaha (which is urban, has a high minority population and borders Iowas which Obama carried) is worth 1 electoral vote by itself. It is currently showing a McCain victory of 569 votes. However, there are between 10,000 and 12,000 early ballots left to count, plus 5,200 provisional ballots. Given however that we know from early ballot exit polling that voters in early voting in that area went for Obama 61 to 39%, Obama is more than 50% likely to pick up that one EV.

And yes, electors aren’t just pulled out of a hat.