Electoral College holds the key to White House

Beautiful is how US political outsider Donald Trump described his shock presidential win against rival Hillary Clinton on the night of November 8, 2016. The details were less clean-cut. Former secretary of state Clinton had received nearly three million more votes than her Republican rival.

But, by narrowly winning key battleground states, Trump surpassed the 270 Electoral College votes necessary to win the White House.

Now, as the 2020 election showdown between Trump and Democrat Joe Biden approaches, the rules of this enigmatic — some argue outmoded — system are coming back into focus.

The 538 members of the US Electoral College gather in their state’s respective capitals every four years after the presidential election to designate the winner.

A presidential candidate must obtain an absolute majority of the college vote — or 270 of the 538 — to win.

The system originated with the US Constitution in 1787, establishing the rules for indirect, single-round presidential elections.

The country’s Founding Fathers saw the system as a compromise between direct presidential elections with universal suffrage, and an election by members of Congress — an approach rejected as insufficiently democratic.

Since then, hundreds of amendments have been proposed to Congress in efforts to modify or abolish the Electoral College, but none has succeeded.

Debate was rekindled with Trump’s victory. If 2020’s race is a nail-biter, then the Electoral College will surely return to the spotlight.

Most are local elected officials or party leaders, but their names do not appear on ballots, and their identities are mostly unknown to voters.

Each state has as many electors as it has members in the House of Representatives (a number dependent on the state’s population) and in the Senate (two in every state, regardless of size).

California, for example, has 55 electors; Texas has 38; and sparsely populated Alaska, Delaware, Vermont and Wyoming have only three each. —