So, you’ve made sure your voter registration is up-to-date, and you’re feeling prepared to vote for your pick of President and Vice President in the next U.S. general election. You’ve been told, and told again, how every last vote matters, and you want your voice to be among the chorus determining everything from the state of LGBTQIA+ and reproductive rights in the U.S. to gun safety, climate change mitigation, and criminal legal system reform.
Before we go any further, we’ll be clear: yes, every vote does matter. (Perhaps even especially so in down-ballot races at the state and local levels; remember, it’s not only the presidency on the ballot!) But depending on which state you live in, we’ll also be frank: your vote for President and Vice President may matter less than they otherwise could. And that’s thanks to the Electoral College.
In recent years, the Electoral College has become the de facto boogeyman in conversations about U.S. presidential elections. But what is the Electoral College, exactly? How does the Electoral College work, and how did it become an entity with so much influence over U.S. elections? Below, we’ll unpack everything you need to know about what the Electoral College is, how it works, and why reformers say it’s so critical to election fairness that we change — or outright abolish — it.
In this article, you’ll find answers to:
- What is the Electoral College?
- Why was the Electoral College established?
- Who is in the Electoral College?
- How does the Electoral College system work?
- Are there problems with the Electoral College?
- Can we change or get rid of the Electoral College?
What is the Electoral College?
The Electoral College is not a place. It’s a process, and a convoluted one at that. Essentially, the Electoral College is the filtration system through which your individual vote for President and Vice President is funneled in order to become part of the final vote for our nation’s top and next-to-top office. That vote is conducted by designated members of the Electoral College, also known as electors, in each state.
In other words, the results that determine the President and Vice President in the U.S. aren’t based on a tallying-up of individual ballots like the one you personally submit at the polls. All of those individual votes instead amount to the popular vote. Who won the popular vote for President in your state is then meant to direct how your Electoral College members vote on behalf of your state. Only two states, Nebraska and Maine, have a slightly different process that occasionally sees them split electoral votes between candidates.
Because the Electoral College system awards the final and most consequential vote to electors, it gives electors in key swing states and smaller states disproportionate power; we’ll get into what we mean by that shortly. This voting system also means it’s possible for a presidential candidate to win the needed majority of Electoral College votes — at least 270 out of 538 electoral votes (more on those numbers later) — and secure the presidency without being the candidate for whom most Americans voted. Sound concerning? Many say it is. And it’s happened in two out of the last six presidential elections, most recently in 2016.
Why, you may be wondering, concentrate power on a per-state basis rather than let every individual American have equal say? We’ll get more into why the U.S. uses the Electoral College voting system next.
Why was the Electoral College established?
The founding of the Electoral College system dates back to 1787, when the founding fathers were drafting the U.S. Constitution. They devised the electoral voting system as a compromise between electing the President by popular vote and having Congress choose the President.
Voting for President by popular vote, they believed, would give states with more enfranchised voters — in other words, Northern states — more power than Southern states, where about 654,000 Black people were enslaved as of the 1790 census and could not vote. For context, in states like Virginia and South Carolina, that year’s census showed enslaved people accounted for roughly 39% and 43% of their state’s populations, respectively. And slavery’s prevalence was only growing: By the time the Civil War began, nearly 4 million people were enslaved in the U.S., the vast majority being in the South.
In avoiding a popular vote for President, the writers of the Constitution — many of whom were enslavers themselves — hoped to appeal to and protect the interests of the white Southerners profiting off of slavery. James Madison, known as the “Father of the Constitution” and an enslaver of Black people on his property in Virginia, made as much clear during drafting discussions, saying that “the right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of [Black people]. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.”
To arrive at their electoral voting system, the founding fathers decided to use the three-fifths clause. Created to determine each state’s so-called “population-based” allotment of representatives in the House, the clause counted every enslaved Black person as three-fifths of a person. Meaning? Even though enslaved people couldn’t vote themselves, their numbers still added to Southern states’ allotment of House of Representatives members and, from there, the number of electoral votes each state got, effectively letting white Southerners use disenfranchised Black people to pad their own voting power.
We’ll talk more about how critics say the Electoral College system continues to cater to the interests of white voters. But before we dive deeper into modern-day criticisms of the Electoral College, let’s make sure we understand who is in the Electoral College and how the system works.
Who is in the Electoral College?
Every state has as many Electoral College members as it has House of Representatives and Senate members. (Reminder: All states have two Senators while the number of House members varies according to a state’s population.) The District of Columbia also has three Electoral College members, bringing the total to 538 electors in the Electoral College overall, a number that hasn’t changed since 1961. You can see a breakdown of Electoral College votes by state here. No state has fewer than three electors while large states can have a lot more (California, for example, has 54).
Who, exactly, gets to be in the Electoral College, you ask?
Every four years, ahead of the presidential election, political party members in each state choose their lineup, or “slate,” of potential electors. The process varies state-to-state, and there are few nationally held rules; the only people who definitely can’t be an elector, per the Constitution, are current members of Congress and those “holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States.” In general, though, electors tend to be party loyalists with strong ties to their state who are often selected at state party conventions or by party central committee vote. They can be former elected officials — Hillary Clinton was an elector in 2020, for example — or current elected officials at the state or local level (just not federal). Electors can also be citizens who are prominent in their community.
Depending on your state’s protocol, when you vote, you may see the names of your state’s electors on your ballot. But you also may not — which can feel a bit strange when you learn that technically, when you cast your vote for President, you’re actually voting for your electors.
What does that even mean? And how does the Electoral College system work? We’ll get into that next.
How does the Electoral College system work?
As confusing as the Electoral College process can be, the simplest way to describe it is this: When you vote for President and Vice President, who you’re really voting for is the slate of electors in your state who were chosen by your preferred candidates’ political party. (Note: The Electoral College process impacts only the office of President and Vice President; most other elections in the U.S. are decided by popular vote.)
If a majority of voters in your state voted the same way you did, then your chosen presidential ticket wins the popular vote in your state. In 48 states and Washington, D.C., a popular vote win means the winning political party’s entire slate of electors is then selected, known as a “winner-take-all” system. In other words, if the Republican candidates win the popular vote in a winner-take-all state like Texas, all 40 of Texas’ electors will be Republican-appointed ones. Maine and Nebraska, meanwhile, use a “congressional district” system, allowing those states to split electoral votes between candidates.
Once the electors from each state and D.C. are finalized, they’ll meet in December to cast the final vote for President and Vice President. Electors are expected to vote in line with the party that nominated them, which means that in theory, the Electoral College vote is simply a formality making November’s win official, and electors aren’t independently influencing who leads the country. But no constitutional provision or federal law outright requires electors to vote this way. Instead, that decision is left up to states, and while many states and D.C. do have laws against “faithless electors” — or, electors who ultimately go against their party’s nominees in the final vote — not all states do.
Faithless electors tend to be rare, but it does happen; the 2016 election saw seven of them. That said, the potential for faithless electors isn’t even critics’ biggest issue with the Electoral College.
Are there problems with the Electoral College?
For starters: By effectively erasing huge pools of votes for candidates who didn’t win the popular vote in a given state, the Electoral College system allows someone to become President by winning the right combination of states’ Electoral College votes – and not by getting the largest number of Americans to vote for them.
Because many states consistently vote one way, the Electoral College system places a too-large emphasis on a small handful of so-called “swing states.” Candidates tend to zero-in on campaigning in these states, giving voters there — not to mention businesses and other financially motivated groups — outsized election power.
Meanwhile, in “winner-take-all” states where the popular vote reliably favors one political party over others, essentially every voter who isn’t casting their ballot for that party stands little-to-no chance of their vote contributing to who becomes President. This reality functions to overrepresent white voters at the expense of voters of color, as Vox reported. Historically, per the Conversation, smaller states have a larger proportion of white residents compared to the national average, and white voters are overrepresented in swing states.
Unsurprisingly, support for the Electoral College system is often found among people who it benefits. Weeks after the 2016 presidential election — which Donald Trump won despite losing the popular vote — a Gallup poll showed that just 19% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents wanted to switch the vote for President from Electoral College voting to a national popular vote, down from 54% in 2011. Meanwhile, the same 2016 poll showed that 81% of Democrat and Democrat-leaning independents wanted to switch, up from around 69% in 2011. In January 2021, weeks after Biden won the 2020 presidential election, some Democrats had changed their tune — 71% then favored a national popular vote, according to Pew Research Center. As of July 2023, though, Democrats were back to a 82% majority in favor of eliminating the Electoral College, Pew reported.
Talking about ending the Electoral College and moving to a direct popular vote for President is one thing. What would it take to actually get there?
Can we change or get rid of the Electoral College?
Over the past 200 years, Congress has seen more than 700 proposals to change or end the Electoral College, and Constitutional amendment proposals aimed at reforming the Electoral College outnumber all other types of amendment proposals, according to the National Archives. Today, a number of states are actively exploring measures to reform or move away from the current voting system. Some of the most popular alternatives include:
This would involve still operating within the parameters of the Electoral College system we have today but following the lead of Maine and Nebraska and doing away with the winner-take-all system. Congressional district-based voting systems allow you to divvy up a state’s total number of electoral votes among parties according to the way different districts within that state vote, allowing the chance for more people’s voices to be heard.
In Nebraska, the impact of this voting system was seen in the 2008 presidential election. As a split-vote state, two of Nebraska’s five Electoral College votes go to the state’s overall popular election winner. The remaining three votes go to the winner of the popular vote on a per-congressional district basis — meaning, if a candidate wins the popular vote in a district but not in the state as a whole, they can still get that district’s electoral vote. In 2008, Nebraska’s vote was split for the first time when Omaha and its suburbs, where Barack Obama won the most support, sent its Electoral College vote to him instead of to the wider state’s popular vote winner, John McCain.
Outright abolishing the Electoral College in favor of a direct popular vote for President — the way most of us vote for other elected officials — is another option. This would involve amending the U.S. Constitution for the first time since 1992; to do that, there would need to be a two-thirds vote from both the House and Senate in order to propose the amendment. Then, the amendment would need to be ratified by at least three-fourths of state legislatures, which is the same process other constitutional amendments have followed.
Alternatively, a constitutional convention could be convened. That would require a petition from two-thirds of state legislatures, and the resulting amendment would need to be ratified by three-fourths of states — a method that’s never been done before.
Potentially the option that’s the most sweeping and the most realistic, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact would allow states to bypass the Electoral College without amending the U.S. Constitution. How would it accomplish that, exactly? When a state joins the compact — as Maine most recently did in April 2024 — that state promises to give all of its electoral votes to the party that wins the national popular vote. This agreement effectively neutralizes states’ popular votes, and 17 states and D.C. have already adopted legislation approving it. The compact will take effect once it’s been joined by enough states to reach a combined 270 Electoral College votes; today, 61 more electoral votes are needed.
Although the compact wouldn’t abolish the Electoral College, it would effectively render it useless by guaranteeing that the winner of the Electoral College and the winner of the popular vote are the same in future elections.
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