The Electoral College: How It Works and Why It Matters

Every four years, the United States engages in the complex process of electing a president. While many believe the winner is simply determined by the national popular vote, the reality is far more intricate. The Electoral College, an institution established during the nation's founding, plays a pivotal role in determining who ultimately occupies the White House. This article delves into the workings of the Electoral College, its historical context, the debates surrounding its existence, and its continued relevance in modern presidential elections.

Understanding the Electoral College

The Electoral College is neither a physical location nor a permanent organization; rather, it is a process outlined in Article Two of the Constitution. It is the formal body which elects the President and Vice President of the United States. It is a group of presidential electors that is formed every four years for the sole purpose of voting for the president and vice president in the presidential election. Instead of directly voting for a candidate, citizens cast their ballots for a slate of electors who have pledged to vote for that particular ticket.

How Many Electors Are There?

The Electoral College consists of 538 electors. A majority of 270 electoral votes is required to elect the President.

Each state is allocated a number of electors equal to its total number of representatives in Congress: one for each member in the House of Representatives plus two Senators. The District of Columbia is allocated 3 electors and treated like a State for purposes of the Electoral College under the 23rd Amendment of the Constitution. The number of electors changes over time because of population fluctuations. If you wonder how many electors your state has, you can consult the National Archives.

The Selection of Electors

In each state, political parties designate their own slate of potential electors before the November general election. These electors are typically elected officials or significant party members, and each state legislature determines the process and timeline for selecting its electors. Electors are often people who play prominent roles in state government or are longstanding party members. In many states, electors are nominated during their party’s nominating conventions just like other candidates who appear on the ballot.

Federal law specifies certain restrictions: They can’t be federal government workers; and they can’t be members of Congress.

After Election Day, each state’s chief election official (in most states, the Secretary of State) prepares a certificate of ascertainment detailing the names of and total number of votes cast for each elector. The Certificate of Ascertainment also lists the number of votes each individual received and shows which individuals were appointed as your State's electors.

The Voting Process

The general election is held every four years on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November. When you vote for a Presidential candidate you are actually voting for your candidate's preferred electors.

Forty-eight states and Washington, D.C. award all their electoral votes to the candidate who receives the greater vote share statewide (“winner take all”). Most States have a “winner-take-all” system that awards all electors to the Presidential candidate who wins the State's popular vote.

The two exceptions are Maine (four electoral votes) and Nebraska (five), which each allot two electoral votes to the candidate who wins the most votes statewide. Maine and Nebraska choose one elector per congressional district and two electors for the ticket with the highest statewide vote. The federal district, Washington, D.C., allocates its 3 electoral votes to the winner of its single district election.

The electors then gather in mid-December to cast their votes for president and vice president, sending the results to Congress. The meeting of the electors takes place on the first Tuesday after the second Wednesday in December after the general election. The electors meet in their respective States, where they cast their votes for President and Vice President on separate ballots. Your State’s electors’ votes are recorded on a Certificate of Vote, which is prepared at the meeting by the electors.

Congress then certifies the votes, on Jan. 6. Each State’s electoral votes are counted in a joint session of Congress on the 6th of January in the year following the meeting of the electors. Members of the House and Senate meet in the House Chamber to conduct the official count of electoral votes. The Vice President of the United States, as President of the Senate, presides over the count in a strictly ministerial manner and announces the results of the vote.

Faithless Electors

Electors are not bound by the Constitution or federal law to vote according to the popular vote in their state; however, 38 states and Washington, D.C., have laws in place requiring electors to vote for their party’s pledged candidate. There is an ongoing legal debate about whether electors are legally required to vote as they pledged. The Supreme Court decision in Chiafalo v. Washington (2020) affirmed the right of states to enforce laws binding electors to their pledges.

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.

Contingent Election

If there’s a tie, or if no candidate earns a majority of the electoral vote, the House of Representatives would hold a contingent election to choose the president. That could happen in the event of a tie or if there are three or more political parties, each of which gets enough votes to prevent any candidate from winning an absolute majority of the vote. In those cases, the House of Representatives would enter a presidential election session, where one vote is assigned to each of the 50 states (Washington, D.C. is excluded because it has no voting members in the House). The House, then, would determine the president by majority vote. The Senate would determine the vice president by majority vote, with each senator casting one vote.

Historical Context and the Founding Fathers

Historically, the Founding Fathers created the Electoral College as a compromise during the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. President, was one of the most controversial issues. President to be elected by Congress, others demanded that the American people elect the President directly. President for the American people based on their cast votes.

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). The compromise was reached after other proposals, including a direct election for president (as proposed by Hamilton among others), failed to get traction among slave states.

To understand the reasons for the compromise, one should know that electing a chief executive was very novel in the 1790s, and no other country directly elected its executive through the direct vote of its citizens. Furthermore, there was "a deep-rooted distrust of executive power. After all, the fledgling nation had just fought its way out from under a tyrannical king and overreaching colonial governors. They didn't want another despot on their hands."

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.

The Three-Fifths Compromise and its Impact

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.

Federalist Papers and the Rationale Behind the Electoral College

In The Federalist Papers, James Madison explained his views on the selection of the president and the Constitution. In Federalist No. 39, Madison argued that the Constitution was designed to be a mixture of state-based and population-based government. Congress would have two houses: the state-based Senate and the population-based House of Representatives.

Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 68, published on March 12, 1788, laid out what he believed were the key advantages to the Electoral College. The electors come directly from the people and them alone, for that purpose only, and for that time only. This avoided a party-run legislature or a permanent body that could be influenced by foreign interests before each election.

Hamilton explained that the election was to take place among all the states, so no corruption in any state could taint "the great body of the people" in their selection. The choice was to be made by a majority of the Electoral College, as majority rule is critical to the principles of republican government.

Hamilton argued that electors meeting in the state capitals were able to have information unavailable to the general public, in a time before telecommunications. Another consideration was that the decision would be made without "tumult and disorder", as it would be a broad-based one made simultaneously in various locales where the decision makers could deliberate reasonably, not in one place where decision makers could be threatened or intimidated.

If the Electoral College did not achieve a decisive majority, then the House of Representatives was to choose the president from among the top five candidates, ensuring selection of a presiding officer administering the laws would have both ability and good character.

In the Federalist No. 10, James Madison argued against "an interested and overbearing majority" and the "mischiefs of faction" in an electoral system. He defined a faction as "a number of citizens whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community." A republican government (i.e., representative democracy, as opposed to direct democracy) combined with the principles of federalism (with distribution of voter rights and separation of government powers), would countervail against factions.

Criticisms and Calls for Reform

Despite its historical origins and the arguments in its favor, the Electoral College has faced consistent criticism throughout American history.

Discrepancies Between Popular Vote and Electoral Vote

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. Five times a candidate has won the popular vote and lost the election. Andrew Jackson in 1824 (to John Quincy Adams); Samuel Tilden in 1876 (to Rutherford B. Hayes); Grover Cleveland in 1888 (to Benjamin Harrison); Al Gore in 2000 (to George W. Bush); Hillary Clinton in 2016 (to Donald J. Trump). This outcome raises questions about the fairness and democratic legitimacy of the system.

The "Winner-Take-All" System and Swing States

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.

Due to how the electoral votes are distributed among the states, a candidate who won the popular vote (the majority of the vote nationwide) can lose the presidency. It has happened five times: once in 2016 and 2000, respectively, and three times in the 1800s.

The reasoning for such change is that nowadays with a closely divided populace, only a handful of 'swing' states in which elections are decided by a small margin, decide the overall results of our presidential elections. In other words, only a few hundred voters who live in the swing states practically determine the election outcome. In the words of Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-MD), who attended the Ash Center Symposium on Electoral College Reform at the Harvard Kennedy School for Democratic Governance and Innovation, "It [the Electoral College] marginalizes the vast majority of Americans…".

Historical Attempts to Reform or Abolish the Electoral College

“There have been more proposals for Constitutional amendments on changing the Electoral College than on any other subject,” according to the National Archives, citing more than 700 efforts to dismantle the process.

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.

The closest Congress has come to amending the Electoral College since 1804 was during the 91st Congress (1969-1971) when the House passed H.J. Res. 681 which would have eliminated the Electoral College altogether and replaced it with the direct election of a President and Vice President (and a run off if no candidate received more than 40 percent of the vote).

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.

Arguments Against Reform

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.

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.”

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.

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact

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 D.C., 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.

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