al
issue arose out of the Alabama Court's findings that the required pledge
was incompatible with the Twelfth Amendment, which contemplated that
Electors, once appointed, should be absolutely free to vote for any
person who was constitutionally eligible to the office of President or
Vice President.[5] This position the Supreme Court combatted as follows:
"It is true that the Amendment says the electors shall vote by ballot.
But it is also true that the Amendment does not prohibit an elector's
announcing his choice beforehand, pledging himself. The suggestion that
in the early elections candidates for electors--contemporaries of the
Founders--would have hesitated, because of constitutional limitations,
to pledge themselves to support party nominees in the event of their
selection as electors is impossible to accept. History teaches that the
electors were expected to support the party nominees. Experts in the
history of government recognize the longstanding practice. Indeed, more
than twenty states do not print the names of the candidates for electors
on the general election ballot. Instead, in one form or another, they
allow a vote for the presidential candidate of the national conventions
to be counted as a vote for his party's nominees for the electoral
college. This long-continued practical interpretation of the
constitutional propriety of an implied or oral pledge of his ballot by a
candidate for elector as to his vote in the electoral college weighs
heavily in considering the constitutionality of a pledge, such as the
one here required, in the primary. However, even if such promises of
candidates for the electoral college are legally unenforceable because
violative of an assumed constitutional freedom of the elector under the
Constitution, Art. II, Sec. 1, to vote as he may choose in the electoral
college, it would not follow that the requirement of a pledge in the
primary is unconstitutional. A candidacy in the primary is a voluntary
act of the applicant. He is not barred, discriminatorily, from
participating but must comply with the rules of the party. Surely one
may voluntarily assume obligations to vote for a certain candidate. The
state offers him opportunity to become a candidate for elector on his
own terms, although he must file his declaration before the primary.
Ala. Code, Tit. 17, Sec. 145. Even though the victory of an independent
candidate for elector in Alabama cannot be anticipated, the state does
offe