What Is the Electoral College, and How Does It Work?

What Is the Electoral College?

First off, the Electoral College is a process, not a place.

Five-hundred and thirty eight electors cast votes for president, based on the vote tally in their individual states. Each state has a number of electors equal to the number of congresspeople and senators from their state. For example, Connecticut has two Senators plus five congressional districts for a total of seven electoral votes. California has two senators plus 53 congresspeople for a total of 55 electoral votes. In this way, electoral votes are distributed roughly by population. Add in Washington D.C and you get a total of 538 electors. To win the presidency, a candidate must get at least 270 electoral votes. Most states have a jackpot, winner-take-all system, where the top vote-getter in each state will be awarded the total number of electoral votes the state has to give. A few states allocate their electoral votes more proportionately. It's up to each state how to allot  their electoral votes.

Election day is the first Tuesday in November. But the electors don’t meet until January to cast their votes. The final step is the certification of the electoral votes in congress in January.

In certain states, electors are permitted to cast their vote for someone other than the top vote-getter in their state. In practice, this happens very rarely, but when it does, these electors are often called ‘faithless electors. In 2016, a total of seven electors went ‘faithless’ and cast a deviant vote: two against the Republican candidate, and five against the Democratic candidate.

See Also: The Science Behind How Your Vote Is Counted

Why Was the Electoral College Created?

The Founding Fathers created the Electoral College system when they drafted the Constitution. Based on the amount of language they devoted to it in both the Constitution and the Federalist Papers, the idea was given careful thought and intended to be a compromise. First, it was a compromise between having a specialized bodyn such as Congress, pick the president or having the people decide the presidency directly. The Founders debated back and forth whether the president should be picked by a certain body of wise men (presumably Congress) or a raw vote. They concluded that allowing the people to choose their own leader without any further stopgap could open the door for a charismatic tyrant to manipulate the election. The extra layer of the Electoral College provided a curb in case the people elected a criminal or a traitor.

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This check on raw democracy is deliberately infused into other aspects of our government. The Supreme Court, for example, can throw out a law that is deemed unconstitutional, even if a majority of the people in the country support it.

This check on raw democracy is deliberately infused into other aspects of our government. 

Second, the Electoral College is also a compromise between a state-based government and a population-based government, which is the same reason we have a House of Representatives and a Senate. At the time, the union was one of 13 individual states. There was no guarantee they would or could function as a cohesive whole. The Founders were worried that big states with big populations would have too much influence on national elections. Smaller states were worried that they would have no effect at all. Southern states with slaves who couldn't vote were worried that the Northern states would have all the influence. The Electoral College was devised to force candidates to attract broader support by forcing them to win the vote in multiple states.

How Does the Electoral College Work Now?

Despite criticism, the Electoral College works more or less as intended.

If the popular vote were the only decider, candidates would campaign in just a small number of big cities in a handful of states and ignore the rest of the country.  In America today, four or five states would matter in a popular election and citizens in other locations  would be out of luck. In the last election, the Republican candidate won the electoral college with 304 electoral votes, but the Democratic candidate won the popular vote by 2.8 million votes. However, the margin in the popular vote came almost entirely from a single state: California. Remove that one state and the popular vote advantage all but disappears. This is what the Founders were looking avoid, that a single state could, in effect, hijack a national election.

What’s Wrong With the Popular Vote?

If a candidate only had to win the pure popular vote, he or she could conceivably do so by promising free mass transit or some other small basket of issues that pertain only to high-population urban areas. The concern of people who live in the suburbs or rural areas could be ignored. Issues that affect farmers, ranchers, energy producers, factory workers, and other groups who typically do not live in high population cities would not be heard or addressed. The Electoral College system was designed to ensure that presidents would have to get support from a diverse array of people around the country.

A pure popular vote involving multiple candidates could produce a president who got a very small slice of the total vote. Requiring that a candidate hit the electoral threshold of 270 avoids that outcome.  

The Electoral College may be imperfect, but any other system would likely have its own set of problems. For over 200 years, the Electoral College has helped produce a stable transfer of power in the United States. Any system that has served our nation well for centuries should be reassessed only with great care.

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Leslie Gold is a radio talk show host, entreprenuer and communicator. She has been a recurring guest host on the Fox News Radio Network, discussing government, politics and it’s effect on commerce and individual rights for the last 6 years. Prior to that she headlined the highly rated “The Radiochick Show” in NYC and syndicated markets for 10 years. She is a multiple industry award winner and has been recognized and one of the top radio hosts in the U.S.  Leslie has also been seen as a guest commentator on CNN, Fox News, Fox Business News, MSNBC, Good Day NY and ABC television. Leslie holds her MBA from the Harvard Business School and graduated from Syracuse University with an undergraduate degree in management.