Although the United States touts its status as one of the world’s leading democracies, its citizens cannot directly elect the president. That task falls to the Electoral College – the complicated way Americans have chosen their president since the 18th century.
Contrary to what the name suggests, the electoral college is more of a process than a body. Every four years, in the December following an election, its members—politicians and largely unknown party loyalists—gather on the same day in all fifty states and cast their votes for president. Then they actually disappear.
In recent years, there has been growing criticism of the electoral college, accelerated 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. But there are no signs that the 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 outlines the process by which a president is elected.
Each state has a number of electors equal to the total number of representatives and senators in Congress. Washington DC gets three electoral votes. There are 538 voters in total. To win, a candidate needs the votes of 270 of them, a simple majority.
The Constitution says state legislatures can choose how to reward their voters. All but two states have long opted to use a winner-take-all system – the winner of the popular vote in their state gets all the electoral votes.
To further complicate matters, two states, Maine and Nebraska, allocate their electors differently. In both states, two Electoral College votes are allocated to the statewide winner. Each state then awards its remaining electors — two in Maine and three in Nebraska — to the winner in each of the state’s congressional districts.
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Why the US have an electoral college?
When the founding fathers met in Philadelphia in 1787 to draft the U.S. Constitution, they had a hard time coming up with a system for choosing a CEO. Initially, they proposed a plan whereby Congress would choose the president. But that raised concerns that the executive branch, which was designed to be independent of Congress, would become subject to it.
A contingent of delegates also favored electing the president through a direct popular vote. But the idea never gained widespread support and was repeatedly shut down during the convention, historian Alexander Keyssar wrote in his book Why do we still have the electoral college.
There were a number of reasons why the idea was not very popular. First, the convention had adopted the racist Three-Fifths Compromise, which counted slaves as three-fifths of a person for population purposes. This was a victory for the Southern states, where slaves made up a significant portion of the population. A popular voting system would have disadvantaged the southern states because they had fewer people who could vote.
There were also concerns about giving too much power to larger states and that voters wouldn’t be able to learn about the candidates from different states, according to Keyssar. It was a debate that was more about pragmatics than political rights, he writes.
Near the end of the convention, a committee of eleven delegates was appointed to deal with outstanding matters, one of which was the manner in which the president should be elected. They proposed a version of what we have now come to understand as the Electoral College.
“This short Christmas story makes clear that the presidential election system enshrined in the Constitution embodied a web of compromises born of months of debate among men who disagreed and were uncertain about the best way to proceed,” Keyssar wrote . “It was, in effect, a second choice by consensus, made acceptable in part by the remarkably complex details of the electoral process, details that themselves constituted compromises between, or gestures toward, particular constituencies and beliefs.”
What is a swing state?
States in which either presidential candidate has a good chance of winning are often called swing states.
In the 2024 elections there are seven swing states: Pennsylvania (19 electoral votes), Wisconsin (10 electoral votes), Michigan (15 electoral votes), Georgia (16 electoral votes), North Carolina (16 electoral votes), Arizona (11 electoral votes) and Nevada (six electoral votes). Whichever candidate wins the election must carry a combination of these states, and therefore the candidates will spend most of their time and resources there. Joe Biden carried all those states except North Carolina in the 2020 election.
The idea of a swing state can also change over time due to changing demographics. For example, until recently Ohio and Florida were considered swing states, but now they are considered quite Republican. Michigan was considered a pretty solid Democratic stronghold until Donald Trump won it in 2016.
Does the Electoral College allow a minority government?
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There have been five elections in American history – in 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016 – in which the candidate who became president did not win the popular vote. This has led to a broader recognition of the system’s imbalances and a push by some to abolish the electoral college altogether.
The loudest criticism is that it is a system that dilutes the influence of a presidential vote depending on where someone lives. A single voter in California represents more than 726,000 people. In Wyoming, one voter represents just over 194,000 people.
Another criticism is that the system allows a small number of Americans to determine the outcome of the presidential election. In 2020, about 44,000 votes between Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona allowed Biden to win the electoral college. Such a small margin is extraordinary in an election in which 154.6 million people voted.
In 2016, about 80,000 combined votes gave Trump his winning margins in key swing states.
Should voters vote for a specific candidate?
State political parties choose people to serve as electors who they believe are loyal party members and who will not go rogue and cast a vote for anyone other than the party’s candidate. Still, voters have occasionally cast their votes for someone else. For example, in 2016, there were seven voters who voted for candidates other than the candidates they committed to. That was the first time there has been a faithless elector since 1972, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Many states have laws that require voters to vote for the candidate to whom they have made a pledge. In 1952, the U.S. Supreme Court said states could force voters to vote for the party’s candidate. And in 2020, the Court said states can penalize voters who don’t vote for the candidate they pledged to.
How did the Electoral College survive for so long?
Since almost immediately after the Electoral College came into effect, there have been efforts to change it. “There were constitutional amendments that were promoted within just over a decade of the constitution being ratified,” Keyssar said. “There have probably been a thousand or more constitutional amendments introduced since 1800 to change or get rid of it. Some of them are close.” (According to the Congressional Research Service, there were more than 700 attempts in 2019.)
When the idea of a national plebiscite was proposed in 1816, Keyssar said, the Southern states objected. Slaves continued to give them power in the electoral college, but could not vote. “They would lose the extra bonus they got for their slaves,” he said.
After the Civil War, African Americans had the legal right to vote, but Southern states continued to prevent them from casting their ballots. A national popular vote would have reduced their influence on the overall outcome, so they continued to support the electoral college system.
The country had already come close to abolishing the electoral college in the late 1960s. In 1968, George Wallace, the southern segregationist governor, nearly threw the system into chaos by gaining nearly enough votes to deny any candidate a majority in the Electoral College. The U.S. House of Representatives has passed proposed amendments 339 through 70. But the measure stalled in the Senate, where senators representing the southern states argued with each other.
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That led to persistent objections to a national popular vote so that southern white people could continue to exercise power, according to the Washington Post. President Jimmy Carter ultimately approved the proposal, but did not receive enough votes in the Senate in 1979 (Joe Biden was among the senators who voted against it).
“It’s not like we suddenly discover that this system really doesn’t work,” says Keyssar.
Is there any chance of getting rid of the Electoral College now?
The most prominent effort today to get rid of the Electoral College is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. The idea is to get states to agree to award their electors to the winner of the national popular vote, regardless of the outcome in their specific state. The pact would come into effect if states with a total of 270 electoral votes – enough to determine the winner of the election – join.
So far, 16 states and Washington DC – a total of 205 electoral votes – have joined the effort.
But the path for the project is uncertain. Nearly all of the states that have not joined have a Republican governor or legislature. And legal observers have questioned whether such an arrangement is constitutional — something that would likely be taken to the U.S. Supreme Court soon.
