“When voters cast their ballots for a candidate for
president of the United States, they are actually voting for the presidential
electors who were selected by that candidate’s party,” according to the National
Conference of State Legislatures.
On ballots around the country, names like “Donald Trump” and “Kamala Harris”
actually represent slates of electors -- members of the Electoral College who
are pledged to vote for that candidate.
There are 538 members of the Electoral College nationwide: one for each state’s
members of Congress, and three more for the District of Columbia. That’s where
the presidential election’s famous number comes from: The candidate with at
least 270 electoral votes (a majority) wins. As we’ve seen in some previous
elections, that candidate doesn’t have to win the popular vote.
Despite its substantial-sounding name, the Electoral College is neither a place
nor a permanent body: It’s more of a process. In each state, political parties
designate their own slate of potential electors before the November general
election.
Nearly every state and the District of Columbia have a winner-take-all policy,
meaning only those electors tied to a candidate who won the popular vote in
their state will send their ballots to the Capitol. Maine and Nebraska divide
the ballots, giving two “at-large” electoral votes to the state’s overall winner
but also one for each congressional district won.
The electors then gather in mid-December to cast their votes for president and
vice president, sending the results to Congress.
Congress then certifies the votes, on Jan. 6. If there’s a tie, the House of
Representatives would hold a contingent election to choose the president.
A presidential candidate can win the Electoral College vote but lose the popular
vote: it happened in 2016 and 2000, and several times in the 1800s.
Who are the Electors?
In most states, the two main parties choose slates
of potential electors either at their conventions or by committee votes. They’re
often people who play prominent roles in state government or are longstanding
party members.
Each state’s legislature determines how electors are chosen — but there are two
main restrictions: They can’t be federal government workers; and they can’t be
members of Congress.
Federal law doesn’t require electors to vote in a way that reflects that results
in their state, but 37 states have laws requiring them to do so, according to
the NCSL. The organization says the 2016 election saw seven “faithless” electors
— including five Democratic electors who refused to cast their votes for Hillary
Clinton — the most since 1972.
Despite their power, electors’ identities aren’t usually widely known outside of
their state. Unlike members of Congress, there isn’t a centralized list of all
the states’ electors, according to the Office of the Federal Register.
The Framers opted against a popular vote
The country’s framers saw the Electoral College as a
way to balance a lot of competing motivations, from the separation of federal
powers to states not wanting to cede power, to concerns of unequal power between
the states due to population differences (and for some, not wanting to risk
losing slavery). LaCroix says even at the time, in the 1780s when this decision
was made at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, the delegates chose
“an unusual body.”
The Constitution’s framers were also dubious about a popular vote, concerned on
one hand that the country was too large for the public to make an informed
choice on a leader — and on the other, that a direct system could help a
demagogue rise to power.
They also considered, but dismissed, the idea of having Congress choose the
president, similar to Great Britain’s parliamentary system. But at the
Convention, Gouverneur Morris — who argued for a popular vote — warned that if
the legislature picked the president, “it will be the work of intrigue, of
cabal, and of faction.”
But some Convention attendees also believed candidates would likely fail to gain
national support outside their region, leaving Congress to decide the
presidency.
“And then they say, well, what about an intermediate body, which becomes the
Electoral College,” LaCroix says.“[It] solves the problem of the president being
too beholden to Congress. It's a temporary body. It's not some entity that has
ongoing power. And they thought that was appealing.”
A further sign of the Electoral College’s ephemeral nature: The term isn’t
mentioned in the Constitution.
Why do some call the Electoral College
a relic of racism?
At the Convention, Southern states successfully
argued for using enslaved people’s population numbers to bolster their power in
Congress, claiming that each slave should be counted as 3/5 of a person — but
not have the right to vote — when calculating representation.
A direct popular vote for the presidency would undermine that power. But if the
Electoral College were to be based on representation in Congress, the Three
Fifths Compromise’s amplification of Southern political power would carry over
into choosing the president. The dynamic has been a force in presidential
elections ever since.
“That's a problem with the Electoral College today, is it just sort of refracts
too much power to small states,” LaCroix says. “And some of it is about smaller
states — or states that were, like Georgia and South Carolina, really concerned
about protecting slavery” in the new Constitution.
The Civil War and the 13th Amendment ended the Three Fifths era. But for decades
afterward, Southern states worked to suppress and dilute Black voters’ impact.
Today, the Electoral College’s critics say that its winner-take-all aspect is
still harmful.
“You see the impact, for example, in the South right now,” Jesse Wegman, author
of the book Let The People Pick The President: The Case For Abolishing The
Electoral College, told NPR’s Fresh Air in 2020. Wegman says millions of Black
citizens’ votes in Southern states are simply drowned out by white majorities.
“You see these patterns replicating themselves throughout our history,” he said.
“The people who stopped the popular vote amendment in the late 1960s were
Southern segregationists. Some of the people who prevented us from getting to a
popular vote in the founding of the country were slave holders. Again and again
the pattern repeats itself.”
The House overwhelmingly voted
to abolish the Electoral College in 1969
Going back more than 50 years, a majority of voters
have supported doing away with the Electoral College.
“Public opinion polls have shown Americans favored abolishing it by majorities
of 58 percent in 1967; 81 percent in 1968; and 75 percent in 1981,” according to
the National Archives.
Momentum to replace the Electoral College got a boost in 1968, when Richard
Nixon notched a razor-thin win of the popular vote — after earlier concerns that
segregationist George Wallace’s third-party candidacy might siphon enough
electoral votes to prevent a clear majority.
Sen. Birch Bayh led a push to amend the Constitution, and in September of 1969,
the House voted 339–70 to adopt the measure. But the amendment languished in the
Senate.
“Led by Southern senators but helped by some very conservative Midwestern
Republicans, the proposal is defeated by a filibuster,” as Harvard Kennedy
School professor Alex Keyssar told NPR’s Throughline ahead of the 2020 election.
A person holds the certificate of electoral votes from Pennsylvania during a
joint session of Congress early on Jan. 7, 2021, as the counting of electoral
votes resumed after the riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Marie Guenther votes at the Bay View Library with
her son on Oct. 20, 2020, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which was considered a
battleground state in the 2020 presidential election.
Segregationists weren’t the only ones who wanted to
preserve the Electoral College. Some Black leaders, such as Vernon Jordan,
argued in the 1970s that Black voters could wield political power as “swing”
election deciders. But many of those leaders later opted to support a popular
vote.
There’s an ongoing debate
over whether to replace the Electoral College
The college’s supporters include the conservative
Heritage Foundation, which says it prevents presidential candidates from
focusing only on winning votes from high-population and urban areas, thus
addressing “the Founders’ fears of a ‘tyranny of the majority,” according to its
website.
The Heritage Foundation also says the Electoral College tends to magnify the
margin of victory, imparting a mandate to govern; and “has the added benefit of
eschewing radical candidates for more moderate ones.”
Even experts who want change also warn that some of the impacts could be
unpredictable.
For instance, Akhil Reed Amar, a law professor at Yale University, told NPR’s
Throughline that running a new, national direct election would bring
complications — from what central federal authority oversees it to how to get 50
states to agree on the rules.
But, Amar added, “Here's my best argument for why we should have reform:
equality. One person, one vote. Each person's vote should count the same…. One
person, one vote is a powerful affirmation of equality.”
In the face of high federal hurdles such as a Constitutional amendment, there is
a push for change at the state level.
Under the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, states adopt legislation
requiring them to award their electors’ votes to whichever presidential
candidate wins the popular vote nationwide. The mechanism would kick in once
enough states join the compact to decide a presidential election.
As of this year, National Popular Vote legislation has become law in 17 states
and DC, reflecting 209 electoral votes. In 2023, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz signed
his state’s version of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. This year,
Maine also joined the group.
The legislation “has also passed at least one legislative chamber in 7 states
possessing 74 electoral votes (Arkansas, Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina,
Nevada, Oklahoma, Virginia),” according to the National Popular Vote website.
The compact needs to add states holding 61 more electoral votes to trigger the
change.
From the
late-1960s through the ’80s, Republicans were convinced that they had a
permanent lock on the Electoral College. The Sun Belt was rising, traditionally
Democratic states were losing population, and Republicans won five of six
presidential elections beginning in 1968. Democrats complained that this archaic
system was a terrible and undemocratic way to choose the country’s executive.
They were right, but they were ignored.
Now the demographic pendulum is swinging toward the Democrats. Young voters,
Hispanics and a more active African-American electorate added states like
Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado and Virginia to President Obama’s winning coalition
in the past two elections, and suddenly Republicans are the ones complaining
about a broken system.
They’re right, too, just as the Democrats were a generation ago. The Electoral
College remains a deeply defective political mechanism no matter whom it
benefits, and it needs to be abolished.
We say that in full knowledge that the college may be tilting toward the kinds
of candidates we tend to support and provided a far more decisive margin for Mr.
Obama earlier this month than his showing in the popular vote. The idea that a
voting method might convey benefits to one side or another, in fact, is one of
the strongest arguments against it.
There should be no structural bias in the presidential election system, even if
population swings might oscillate over a long period of decades. If Democrats
win a string of elections, it should be because their policies and their
candidates appeal to a majority of the country’s voters, not because supporters
are clustered in enough states to get to 270 electoral votes. Republicans should
broaden their base beyond a shrinking proportion of white voters not simply to
win back Colorado, but because a more centrist outlook would be good for the
country.
The problems with the Electoral College — born in appeasement to slave states —
have been on display for two centuries; this page called it a “cumbrous and
useless piece of old governmental machinery” in 1936, when Alf Landon won 36
percent of the popular vote against Franklin Roosevelt but received only 8 of
the 538 electoral votes.
But 76 years later, the system continues to calcify American politics. As Adam
Liptak of The Times recently wrote, this year’s candidates campaigned in only 10
states after the conventions, ignoring the Democratic states on the West Coast
and Northeast and the Republican ones in the South and the Plains. The number of
battleground states is shrinking, and turnout in the other states is lower. The
undemocratic prospect of a president who loses the popular vote is always
present (it’s happened three times), as is the potential horror show of a tie
vote that is decided in Congress.
The last serious consideration of a constitutional amendment to abolish the
college, in 1970, was filibustered by senators from small states who feared
losing their disproportionate clout. The same thing would probably happen today,
even though Republicans (who tend to dominate those states) are increasingly
skeptical of the college.
The best method of moving toward direct democracy remains the National Popular
Vote plan, under which states agree to grant their electoral votes to the ticket
that gets the most popular votes around the country. Legislators in eight states
and the District of Columbia (representing 132 electoral votes) have agreed to
do so; the plan would go into effect when states totaling 270 electoral votes
sign up.
Until then, new generations of voters will continue to find themselves appalled
by the system left to them by their populist-fearing ancestors. An 18-year-old
voter in California and one in Oklahoma will have much in common when they
realize they are each being ignored, and when they realize there is something
their lawmakers can do about it.
REUTERS -
The U.S. Electoral College was established in the Constitution as a compromise
between electing a president by a vote in Congress and by popular vote of
citizens. Here are some facts about the Electoral College:
* The Electoral College, which is not a place but a process, consists of 538
electors. To win the presidency, a candidate must win at least 270 electors.
* The number of electors equals the number of lawmakers in Congress - 435 in the
House of Representatives and 100 in the Senate, plus three for the District of
Columbia. Each state's allotment of electors equals its number of
representatives in the House plus one for each of its two senators.
* Most states have a winner-take-all system for awarding electors. The
presidential candidate who wins the popular vote in the state gets all of the
state's electors. Maine and Nebraska have a variation of "proportional
representation" that can result in a split of their electors between the
candidates.
* Critics say the Electoral College does not meet the original intent because a
candidate can lose the nationwide popular vote and still win the election by
winning the right combination of states. That happened most recently in the
controversial election of 2000 when Democrat Al Gore got the most votes but
Republican George W. Bush won the presidency. Republicans Rutherford B. Hayes in
1876 and Benjamin Harrison in 1888 also won in the Electoral College despite
losing the popular vote.
* There is no constitutional requirement that electors vote according to the
results of the popular vote, although some states require it.
* The electors meet in their states in December and cast their votes for
president and vice president.
* If no presidential candidate reaches 270 electoral votes, the election goes to
the House of Representatives, with each state having one vote.
The House has decided two presidential elections - that of Thomas Jefferson in
1800 and John Quincy Adams in 1824.
The Senate would elect the vice president, with each senator casting one vote.
That raises the possibility of a president and vice president from different
parties.
* The biggest Electoral College prizes are California, with 55; Texas, with 38;
and New York and Florida, each with 29. California and New York are considered
reliably Democratic, Texas reliably Republican and Florida is a battleground
state that could go either way.
* Among the other important swing states this year, Ohio has 18 votes, Virginia
13, Wisconsin 10, Colorado 9, Nevada 6, Iowa 6 and New Hampshire 4.
* The system explains why candidates tend to spend a disproportionate amount of
time and money on trying to secure the battleground states. It also means that
what appears to be a tight race in national opinion polls may be less close when
viewed state by state.
SOURCES: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Reuters.
(Reuters) - The Electoral College, not the popular vote, actually elects the
president of the United States. Here are some facts about the Electoral College:
* There are 538 members of the Electoral College, allotted to each of the 50
states and the District of Columbia based on their representation in the U.S.
Congress. The smallest states have three members while the largest state,
California, has 55. Washington, D.C., which has no voting representation in
Congress, has three, the same as the smallest state.
* It takes 270 votes to win election. The electors are pledged to one candidate
or the other but there is no federal law requiring them to vote that way. There
have been several incidents in which so-called faithless electors have voted for
someone other than the candidate to whom they were pledged.
* In 48 states and the district, the candidate who wins the popular vote wins
all of the state's electors. Nebraska and Maine have a proportional system of
awarding electors.
* Electors, who are picked by the respective political parties, make two
selections -- for president and for vice president. They may not vote for two
candidates from their own state.
* Because a candidate could run up a big vote count in some states but lose
others by narrow margins, the winner of the popular vote might not have the most
electoral votes. The Electoral College has three times picked the candidate who
lost the popular vote -- Republicans Rutherford Hayes in 1876, Benjamin Harrison
in 1888 and George W. Bush in 2000.
* The Electoral College meets in each state to cast its votes on a Monday early
in December following the November popular election. The votes are then tallied
in a joint session of Congress on January 6 of the following year.
* If no candidate receives a majority of the electoral votes, the House of
Representatives chooses among the top three candidates with each state having
only one vote. If no vice presidential candidate receives a majority, the Senate
decides between the top two candidates.
* The House has twice decided the outcome of the presidential race -- in the
1800 and 1824 elections. The Senate decided the vice presidency once, in the
1836 election.
* This unique system was the result of a compromise by the writers of the U.S.
Constitution in the 18th century between those who wanted direct popular
election and those who wanted state legislatures to decide. One fear was that at
a time before political parties, the popular vote would be diluted by voting for
an unwieldy amount of candidates.
