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The Constitution doesn’t make any mention of either requiring or forbidding the Electors from voting for any particular person. Therefore, the power to require a certain vote is neither given to the federal government nor forbidden to the States.

Therefore, the 10th amendment says the State’s or the people retain that right. It would be silly if the people had that power so the States retain it.

BTW, the Electors still have the right to vote. As citizens they have the same right as any other citizen to cast their individual votes for whoever they want to vote for at their polling place.

I expected you to land on the concept of different kinds of votes. Your argument is that vote as a citizen for a candidate is not the same as a legislator's vote on a bill which is not the same as an Elector's vote for a President which is not the same as a juror's vote on guilt or innocence.

I'm saying that a vote is a vote is a vote. It is the individual's unique franchise in a representative republic no matter under what circumstances or in what capacity that citizen's vote is being called for. It is an inalienable right of liberty that an individual's vote is his own property.

Where I think you are wrong is when you speak of a "power to require a certain vote." There is no such power. The vote is the property of the citizen, not the state. To "require" that a vote be cast in a state-desired way, whether it's for a desired candidate, or a desired proposition, or to condemn a hated defendant at a trial, makes it no vote at all. It becomes something else if the citizen is not free to choose how that vote is cast.

Compelling a citizen to give his vote to the state to be cast at the state's direction is not a power of the state under the 10th amendment.

-PJ

Let's take this and apply it to another Constitutional power.

Just as how the Constitution, in Article II Section 1, defines the Elector but not the process for selecting Electors (granted to the state), it also grants YOU a Constitutional power in the 5th, 6th and 7th amendments as a member of a jury of peers in criminal and civil trials.

Using your argument, we know that the Constitution gives YOU the power to vote on guilt or innocence in a trial. We also know that the state has powers for defining how jurors are selected. Is it your contention that the state, therefore, has the power to tell you how to vote on the jury? If the overwhelming sentiment of the community is that the defendant is guilty, can the state compel you to vote on the jury as the public sentiment indicates?

In rebuttal, the 6th amendment qualifies the jury as "impartial," the 5th amendment qualifies the jury as "Grand," and the 7th amendment is silent. If you agree that the 6th amendment "impartial" jury prohibits the state from legislating how the jury should vote, do you believe that the absence of a word like "impartial" in Article II Section 1 means that the state can treat Electors as partial and dictate how they must vote?

The Constitution is absent partiality in 5th amendment Grand Juries and 7th amendment civil juries; does this mean that the state can mandate how these juries must vote, but except only 6th amendment criminal juries?

Is the Constitution to be taken THAT literally, the Electors can be mandated to vote partisan, that Grand Juries and civil juries, due to the absence of the word "impartial" can be mandated how to vote, but that only criminal juries are free to vote without state interference?

Or do you believe, as I do, that the right to vote is inalienable, is the property of the citizen in any civil capacity, and is beyond the reach of the 10th amendment and the state to control?

-PJ