Time for Electoral College 101
Mechanism to pick presidents has taken flak for over 200 years
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 spotlight on the process is even greater this year because President Donald Trump has refused to concede the election and continued to make baseless allegations of fraud. That makes the meeting of the Electoral College another solid, undeniable step toward Inauguration Day on Jan. 20, when Joe Biden will be sworn in as president.
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 their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote in their state.
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 last two decades.
Biden won the popular vote and will end up with 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232. Trump was the fifth presidential candidate in American history to have lost the popular vote but won in the Electoral College.
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.
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.
Once the electoral votes are cast, they are sent to Congress, where both houses will convene on Jan. 6 for a session presided over by Vice President Mike Pence. The envelopes from each state and the District of Columbia will be opened and the votes tallied.
And then there’s one more step: inauguration.