What’s in store when the Electoral College meets?
WASHINGTON – Voters cast their ballots for president more than a month ago, but the votes that officially matter will be cast Monday. That’s when the Electoral College meets.
The Constitution gives the electors the power to choose the president, and when all the votes are counted Monday, President-elect Joe Biden is expected to have 306 electoral votes, more than the 270 needed to elect a president, to 232 votes for President Donald Trump.
Some questions and answers about the Electoral College:
Question: What exactly is the Electoral College?
A: In drafting the Constitution, America’s founders struggled with how the new nation should choose its leader and ultimately created the Electoral College system. It was a compromise between electing the president by popular vote and having Congress choose the president.
Under the Constitution, states get a number of electors equal to their total number of seats in Congress: two senators plus however many members the state has in the House of Representatives. With the exception of Maine and Nebraska, states award all of their electoral college votes to the winner of the popular vote in their state.
Q: What’s the beef with the Electoral College?
A: The Electoral College has been the subject of criticism for more than two centuries. One often-repeated gripe: The person who wins the popular vote can nonetheless lose the presidential election. That happened twice in the past two decades – in 2000 with the election of George W. Bush and in 2016 when Donald Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes.
Biden won the popular vote and will end up with 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232. Four years ago, Trump became the fifth presidential candidate in American history to have lost the popular vote but won in the Electoral College.
Q: Who are the electors?
A: Presidential electors typically are elected officials, political hopefuls or longtime party loyalists.
This year, they include South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a Trump elector who could be a 2024 Republican presidential candidate, and Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams, her party’s 2018 nominee for governor and a key player in Biden’s win in the state.
Among others are 93-year-old Paul “Pete” McCloskey, a Biden elector who is a former Republican congressman who challenged Richard Nixon for the 1972 GOP presidential nomination on a platform opposing the Vietnam War; Floridian Maximo Alvarez, an immigrant from Cuba who worried in his Republican convention speech that anarchy and communism would overrun Biden’s America; and Muhammad Abdurrahman, a Minnesotan who tried to cast his electoral vote for Sen. Bernie Sanders instead of Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Q: Where do they meet, and what do they do?
A: The Electoral College doesn’t meet in one place. Instead, each state’s electors and the electors for the District of Columbia meet in a place chosen by their legislature, usually the state capitol. The election is low-tech. Electors cast their votes by paper ballot: one ballot for president and one for vice president. The votes get counted, and the electors sign six certificates with the results. Each certificate gets paired with a certificate from the governor detailing the state’s vote totals.
Those six packets then get mailed to various people specified by law. The most important copy, though, gets sent to the president of the Senate, the current vice president. This is the copy that will be officially counted later.
Q: Do electors have to vote for the candidate who won their state?
A: In 32 states and the District of Columbia, laws require electors to vote for the popular-vote winner. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld this arrangement in July. Electors almost always vote for the state winner anyway because they generally are devoted to their political party.