Hillary Clinton is almost certain to carry Washington state next month. But she won’t necessarily collect all of its electoral votes. Robert Satiacum Jr., one of the Democratic Party’s slate of 12 electors in Washington, has been mulling in public about whether he can bring himself to vote for his party’s nominee. He may yet fall in line, and he may simply give up his seat in the Electoral College. But there’s a chance he’ll cast his ballot for Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein, or some other person not named “Clinton” or “Trump.”
This is the other way a minor-party candidate can eat into the major-party nominees’ Electoral College totals: In 21 states, it is legal for a so-called “faithless elector” to ignore the popular vote and cast a ballot for someone else. So while we’re pondering the possibility that Evan McMullin might carry Utah or Gary Johnson might pull off an upset in New Mexico, let’s take a moment to consider this other scenario. After all, a third-party candidate hasn’t won a state outright since 1968, when George Wallace carried five states in the South. But in six of the 12 elections going back to then, faithless electors have voted for alternative candidates—or, sometimes, for people who weren’t actually running for president at all: