Although the United States touts its status as one of the world’s leading democracies, its citizens cannot directly choose their president. That task is reserved to the Electoral College, the complex method by which Americans have elected presidents since the 18th century.
Despite its name, the Electoral College is more of a process than an organization. Every four years, in December after the election, members, including politicians and mostly unknown party supporters, gather in all 50 states on the same day to vote for president. Then they essentially disappear.
Criticism of the electoral system has increased in recent years, fueled by the fact that two Republican presidents, George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016, were elected president while losing the popular vote. are. But there is no sign that US elections will change anytime soon.
Here’s everything you need to know
What exactly is the Electoral College?Article II of the U.S. Constitution establishes the process for selecting the president.
Each state has as many electors as there are representatives and senators in Congress combined. Washington DC gets three electors. The total number of electors is 538. A candidate needs a simple majority of 270 votes to win.
Gray map of the United States with blue and red circlesThe Constitution provides that state legislatures can choose how to award electors. All but two states have long chosen to adopt a winner-take-all system. That is, the winner of that state’s popular vote wins all the electors.
Further complicating matters, two states, Maine and Nebraska, award different awards to their electors. In both states, two electoral votes are allocated to the statewide winner. Each state then awards its remaining electors (two in Maine and three in Nebraska) to the winners of each state’s congressional district.
Why does the United States have an electoral system?When the Founding Fathers met in Philadelphia in 1787 to draft the U.S. Constitution, they had great difficulty finding a system for electing the chief executive. Initially, they proposed a plan to have Congress elect the president. But that raised concerns that the executive branch, which was designed to be independent from Congress, would also be subject to it.
The delegates also supported electing the president by direct popular vote. But the idea never gained widespread support and was dropped several times during party conventions, writes historian Alexander Keyser in his book Why We Still Have an Electoral College.
There are several reasons why this idea did not catch on widely. First, the convention adopted the racist Three-Fifths Compromise, which counted slaves as three-fifths of the population. This was a victory for the Southern states, where slaves made up a significant portion of their populations. A popular vote system would disadvantage southern states where fewer people could vote.
Map of the United States with California colored pink and several states of the United States colored green, showing the states’ populations
Keyser said there was also concern that it would give too much power to large states and prevent voters from learning about candidates in different states. It was a debate more about practical matters than about political rights, he writes.
Towards the end of the Congress, a committee of 11 delegates was appointed to deal with outstanding issues, one of which was how to select the president. They proposed a version of the electoral system as we currently understand it.
“This short Nativity story shows how the constitutional presidential election system was a web of compromise created by months of debate between people who disagreed with each other and were unsure of the best way to proceed. It is clear that it has materialized,” Keysar wrote. “In effect, this is a second choice by consensus, in part due to the strikingly complex details of the electoral process, which itself constitutes a compromise between, or a gesture toward, particular constituencies and beliefs. The details made it more acceptable.”
What is a swing state?
States where one presidential candidate has a good chance of winning are often called swing states.
In the 2024 election, Pennsylvania (19 electors), Wisconsin (10 electors), Michigan (15 electors), Georgia (16 electors), and North Carolina (16 electors) There are seven battleground states: , Arizona (11 electors); (electoral votes), Nevada (6 electors). No matter which candidate wins the election, they will have to have some combination of these states, which is where they will spend most of their time and resources. Joe Biden won all of these states except North Carolina in the 2020 election.
The idea of swing states may also change over time due to demographic changes. For example, Ohio and Florida were until recently considered swing states, but are now considered fairly solidly Republican. Michigan was considered a fairly strong Democratic stronghold until Donald Trump won in 2016.
Red and blue bar chart showing the electoral vote strength of each US state
Does the Electoral College allow for minority rule?
There have been five elections in U.S. history in which a presidential candidate failed to win the popular vote: 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016. This has led to widespread recognition of the system’s imbalances, with some calling for the electoral system to be abolished completely.
The most vocally criticized system is that it reduces the influence of presidential votes depending on where you live. Each elector in California represents more than 726,000 people. In Wyoming, the electorate represents just over 194,000 people.
Red and gray bar chart comparing electoral and popular votes in past elections
Another criticism is that the system allows a small number of Americans to decide the outcome of presidential elections. In 2020, Biden won the electoral college in Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona by a margin of about 44,000 votes. Such a difference is unusual in an election in which 154.6 million people voted.
In 2016, a total of about 80,000 votes gave Trump a margin of victory in key battleground states.
Do electors have to vote for a particular candidate?
State political parties select electors who are loyal to the party and who they believe will not fraudulently vote for anyone other than the party’s candidates. Still, electors sometimes vote for other people. In 2016, for example, seven electors voted for a candidate other than their pledged candidate. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, this is the first time since 1972 that there have been faithless electors.
Many states have laws that require electors to vote for the candidate to whom they have pledged. In 1952, the U.S. Supreme Court said states could force electors to vote for their party’s candidates. And in 2020, the court said states can penalize electors who don’t vote for the candidates they promised.
Why has the Electoral College existed for so long?
Efforts have been made to change the electoral system almost since its enactment. “Constitutional reform has been underway for over 10 years since the Constitution was ratified,” Keysar said. “Since 1800, perhaps more than 1,000 constitutional amendments have been introduced to change or repeal the Constitution, some of which come close.” (As of 2019, according to the Congressional Research Service) There were over 700 initiatives.
When the idea of a national popular vote was proposed in 1816, Southern states opposed it, Keyser said. Slaves continued to have power in the Electoral College, but could not vote. “They will lose the special bonus they got for their slaves,” he says.
After the Civil War, African Americans were legally given the right to vote, but Southern states continued to suppress African Americans from voting. They continued to support the electoral system because a national popular vote would have less influence on the overall outcome.
The country came close to abolishing the electoral system once in the late 1960s. In 1968, George Wallace, the racist governor of the South, nearly won enough votes to deny him an Electoral College majority and nearly threw the system into chaos. The U.S. House of Representatives passed the amendment 339-70. However, the bill stalled in the Senate due to a filibuster by senators representing southern states.
According to the Washington Post, this led to continued opposition to a national popular vote that would have allowed southern whites to continue wielding power. President Jimmy Carter ultimately supported the proposal, but it did not receive enough votes in the Senate in 1979 (Joe Biden was one of the senators who voted against it).
“It’s not like we suddenly found out that this system really doesn’t work,” Keyser said.
Is there now a possibility of abolishing the Electoral College?
Today, the most prominent effort to abolish the electoral college is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. The idea is to get states to agree to give their electors the winner of the national popular vote, regardless of the outcome in a particular state. The agreement takes effect when states with a total of 270 electoral votes, enough to determine the winner of the election, join.
So far, 205 electors from 16 states and Washington, D.C., have joined the effort.
However, the future of this project is uncertain. Almost every nonmember state has a Republican governor or legislature. And legal experts are questioning the constitutionality of such an arrangement, which will likely soon be brought before the U.S. Supreme Court.
