James Moyer wrote a book several years ago, explaining to readers that in the past, voters could vote for individual candidates for presidential elector. The book is “Winner-Takes-All: The Secret History of the Electoral College.” By 1984, voters in all states had lost this ability. Vermont and Louisiana had been the last states to let voters cast votes for individual elector candidates.

Now Moyer has put up a webiste about this. See it here. If one goes to the website, one can play a very clear ten-minute youtube that furnishes the information that is in the book.

If ballots still let voters vote for each individual elector candidate, the law on presidential qualifications would be much clearer than it is now. Most states won’t print the names of presidential candidates on their ballots if that candidate doesn’t meet the constitutional qualifications. But if people understood that the true candidates in November are the elector candidates, that policy would change. Back in 1892, when the Prohibition Party nominated a 33-year-old for vice-president, no state kept the ticket off the ballot, and the Prohibition Party was on every government-printed ballot in the nation, except for South Dakota; and the South Dakota omission had nothing to do with the qualifications issue.

On December 13, Tennessee filed this brief in Darnell v Hargett, 24-5856. This is the Libertarian Party lawsuit against the Tennessee procedure for a political party to qualify for the ballot, which is so difficult, it has not been used successfully since 1968 when the American Party and George Wallace qualified.

The state’s brief does not discuss the harm done to voters by the state’s policy. Because Tennessee has easy independent candidate procedures, minor parties always use those. But in Tennessee, candidates who use the independent procedure cannot have a partisan label on the ballot next to their names, other than the word “independent.” So the voters aren’t able to know which party the various candidates represent, unless they have the information from some source other than the ballot. Courts have been unanimous that voter confusion is an evil that should be avoided if at all possible.