Electoral College

Do US citizens vote directly for the president? Well, yes and no - citizens cast their votes in their state, and then the state chooses electors who then vote directly for the president. The Electoral College is important because it determines how candidates will campaign and who will become the next president!

Electoral College Definition

The Electoral College is the system used in the United States to choose the next president. Voting is by state, with the winner of each state typically receiving all of that state's electoral votes. The candidate with the most electoral votes wins the election.

Electoral College History

One of the biggest debates at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 was around the presidency: specifically, how they should be elected and who should get to elect them.

Constitutional Convention

Some delegates thought that it should be a popular vote (meaning that every eligible citizen casts a vote and the candidate with the most votes wins) while others thought that regular people (i.e. poor people, men who didn't own land, women, and non-White people) couldn't be trusted to make informed decisions. Some people thought that only Congress should have the authority to select the president, while others thought it could lead to corruption and quid pro quos between Congress and the president.

Additionally, small states worried that a popular election would give all of the power to large states.

Electoral College Compromise

The electoral college has been described as a workaround because the framers were having trouble figuring out how to balance all of the various needs. In the end, they decided to create a system where each state was allotted a certain number of electors (or votes) based on the state's population. Whichever candidate won the popular vote within the state would then win the state's points.

Slavery and the Electoral College

The number of representatives (and, by extension, the number of electors) is decided based on the state's population. In the South, around 40% of the population was enslaved and didn't have the right to vote or be represented in Congress. But Southern states still wanted them to be counted in their population so that they would be allotted more representatives (and electors) in Congress. However, Northern delegates felt it would give the South an unfair advantage. They settled on the infamous three-fifths compromise, which said that enslaved people would count as three-fifths of a person for purposes of counting the population.

Electoral College in the Constitution

The Electoral College is in Article II (relating to the Executive Branch), Section of the Constitution. Below is an excerpt:

Vice Presidency and the 12th Amendment

Article II Section I also goes on to say:

If you've followed any presidential elections before, you know that that's not how the United States chooses a Vice President today! During the Constitutional Convention, the framers thought it would be fairest if the person who won the most votes won the presidency while the person with the second-most votes won the vice presidency.

Twelfth Amendment

In 1804, Congress passed the Twelfth Amendment, which updated the electoral process to require separate votes for the president and vice president to reduce the opportunity for party meddling and tied results.

Twenty-Third Amendment

The next major constitutional update to the electoral process came in 1961 with the Twenty-Third Amendment. After several decades of advocacy, the amendment grants Washington D.C. (which doesn't have any Senators or Representatives) the right to appoint electors just like the 50 states.

Electoral College Map

Today, there are 538 total electors from the 50 states and Washington D.C. Candidates have to receive over half of the electoral points (270, to be exact) to win - once one person passes the 270-point threshold, they officially win the presidency. Check out the map below to learn more about how they're distributed!

Figure 1: The 2024 Electoral College Map. Source: Chessrat, Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-1.0

Electoral College Votes

Electoral votes are determined by the number of Congressional legislators (senators and representatives) the state has.

Check out the table below to see how many points each state gets in the electoral college! California has the most with 54, while a few states are tied for the least at 3. Keep in mind that the number of electoral votes can change year by year as the population goes up or down. For example, between 2020 and 2024, some states (including Pennsylvania, New York, Michigan, and Florida) lost one vote each while other states (like Oregon and Montana) gained some. This data is from 2024.¹

How are Electors Chosen?

The Constitution leaves it up to each state to decide how they want to choose their electors. In the beginning, the state legislature typically selected electors. Today, electors are mostly ceremonial, often appointed by party leaders.

The winner of the state's electoral votes (and thus the person to whom the electors pledge their vote) is determined by the popular vote. Forty-eight states and Washington D.C. use a winner-takes-all system. This means that whoever gets the most votes in the state wins all of the state's points. Maine and Nebraska use a proportional system. Voting goes by district, so the candidate who wins each individual district wins their vote.

Faithless Electors

The Constitution doesn't legally require electors to vote for the candidate chosen by their state or district. Electors who cast their vote for someone other than the person who won their state or district are called faithless electors. Faithless electors don't happen often and they haven't changed the outcome of an election (plus, most states have fines for faithless electors). In 2016, there were ten faithless electors, most of whom voted for a third party.

Figure 2: The states marked red have laws to punish faithless electors. Source: Mailman9, Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA-3.0

Procedure

Once the candidate has reached the needed 270 votes in November, the electors meet for a Joint Session in Congress on January 6th. Once all of the votes are counted, the Vice President officially announces the winner.

Contingent and Indecisive Elections

A contingent election is when no candidate reaches the needed 270 votes, and an indecisive election is when the election results in a tie. Both cases result in the House deciding who should be president.

Electoral College Pros and Cons

Over the years, the electoral college has been criticized as outdated and racist because of its origins in slavery. But others point out that there isn't really a good alternative system.

Pros

One of the pros goes back to the debates at the Constitutional Convention: the electoral college helps balance the power between large states and small states. For example, the population in California is almost 40 million, compared to Rhode Island at 1 million. Instead of a difference of 39 million votes, it's only a difference of 51 votes.

Another benefit is that it ensures that a new president will be chosen. Periods of ambiguity or uncertainty in leadership often lead to unrest, so having a process set in stone helps ensure peaceful transitions from one president to another.

• Balance of power between small and large states
• Certainty of election results
• Smooth transition of power

Cons

One negative is that the electoral college gives tremendous power to swing states. If you're a political candidate and your party is dominating a state but has no chance of winning another, you probably won't spend much time or effort in those states. States that swing back and forth from one party to another are often called battleground states because candidates will spend massive amounts of money and time trying to persuade people in that state to vote for them.

This can also mean that if you aren't in a swing state, or if you voted for the Republican candidate in a Democratic state (and vice versa), you could feel like your vote doesn't matter.

Because it's so costly to run election campaigns, the electoral college makes it essentially impossible for a third-party candidate to win an election. It also means that candidates need the support of one of the two major parties to have a chance at winning.

Lastly, the electoral college has become increasingly unpopular because it can sometimes go against the popular vote. This has happened five times, with two of the most controversial happening in 2000 (when Al Gore won the popular vote but George W. Bush won the electoral college) and 2016 (when Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but Donald Trump won the presidency).

Figure 3: This map from the 1932 election shows how the vast majority of states voted for the Republican candidate, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but he only won 57% of the popular vote. Source: Andy85719, Wikimedia Commons