Purpose
This website is a companion to the book Winner-Takes-All: The Secret History of the Electoral College.(Amazon, Barnes and Noble: ebook/paperback) and the video explainer How the Electoral College’s winner-takes-all works.
The book explains to voters what a mixed presidential elector ballot is and the known legal acceptance of such a ballot for election year 2020.
This website is intended to update voters on the current known state by state legal acceptance of a mixed elector ballot for election year 2024.
What is a mixed elector ballot?
On election day voters do not vote for the President, they vote directly for the Presidential Electors.
That is not clear on modern ballots, it's more apparent on older ballots such as this 1924 Ohio Presidential Elector ballot.
When a voter (except in Maine and Nebraska) votes for Presidential Elector they cast a number of votes equal to their states elector count.
In 1924 Ohio had 23 electoral votes. A voter in Ohio in 1924 could cast 23 votes for presidential elector.
At the top of the ballot were straight ticket devices, allowing the voter to cast all their 23 votes for one Presidential ticket. However, a voter could have also mixed and matched their 23 votes between the five presidential tickets.
In time, the straight ticket devices were relabelled with the names of the party’s nominees for President and Vice-President, and the matrix allowing voters to individually select the Presidential Electors was dropped.
Winner-takes-all is a consequence of the modern ballot. Modern ballots don’t offer a way for voters to split their electoral votes, so the presidential ticket wins as a block.
When voters could split their electoral votes, states could have a mixed electoral college result.
The ability to cast a mixed elector ballot allows voters to make a more nuanced democratic expression.
And in that regard, the book believes that the inability to mix and match presidential electors is democracy denied. If voters understood what they are missing, they would demand the right to use a mixed elector ballot, even if they desired to cast all their electoral votes for one presidential ticket.
However, the historical record regarding the “Presidential short ballot” suggests that the dropping of the matrix was not intended to prevent a voter from casting a mixed elector ballot, but that the voter could do so in the write-in space.
“Since the ballot contained a blank column or blank lines for the write-in privilege, this group arrangement did not infringe upon the right of the voter who wished to choose his electoral candidates from more than one party. (Albright, Spencer D. “The Presidential Short Ballot.” The American Political Science Review, vol. 34, no. 5, 1940)
In 2020 the author of the book queried the affected 49 state elections administrators and asked them whether they would count a mixed elector ballot cast through the write-in space.
The author has done this again for 2024, and provides their up to date answers below.
2024 State by State information
As much as there is a highlighting here of individual states , the legal theory below applies to all 51 states.
1.) State laws grant voters the entitlement to vote for presidential electors.
2.) In almost all states, laws prohibit the printing of the names of candidates for presidential elector on the ballot. That is the key component of the Presidential Short Ballot.
3.) With voters given the entitlement to vote for presidential elector but not given a ballot with the names of those candidates, the ballots should inherently provide a write-in space allowing voters to cast their elector votes. When the write-in space is not large enough, the voter may be able to use a sticker (a method directly referenced in New Jersey law.)
3a.) When law does not explicitly require the printing of write-in blanks for presidential elector, there is no law which prohibits election officials from adding a presidential elector write-in blank to the ballot.
4.) In the couple of instances of states which print candidates for elector on the ballot (such as Arizona,) voters should be able to just circle the names of the candidates directly on the ballot.
Full state detail .pdf (updated Oct 12)
Secondary documents:
Book Errata
1.) Clarification: The book’s proposed style of mixed elector ballot, in the absence of any information from a state electoral authority, comes in the form of a voter supplied listing. This style of ballot falls under “irregular ballot” laws which some, but not all, states support.
2.) The chapter on Maine and Nebraska is wrong.
Maine and Nebraska voters do in fact elect all their presidential electors, unlike the other states this happens in a 1+2 configuration, where one elector is elected from a district, and the other 2 are elected at-large/statewide. This means that voters in those states are casting 3 votes simultaneously, with the only difference from other states that it’s happening in two separate races. One selection on the presidential short ballot casts the 1+2 votes.