Electoral College chooses president
Sometimes it’s the person with fewer votes
As the 2020 presidential election nears, one of the most confusing and controversial parts of the nation’s political system is yet again front-and-center: the Electoral College.
It’s the system that, four years ago, made Donald Trump president even though Hillary Clinton won the popular vote handily.
That’s because the Electoral College, established in Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution, determines the winner of the presidential election.
But come Election Day, your vote will impact what the Electoral College does. Here’s a quick refresher on the subject:
Why do they call it the Electoral College?
Merriam-webster.com says “electoral” likely makes sense, as the term is clearly related to the election. But what about “college?” Historically, “college” has meant “various groups of people who are associated by a common pursuit or have common interests or duties.” Inthis case, those groups of people are the electors.
What are its basics?
The Electoral College is made up of 538 delegates: people who cast the votesthat formally elect the president. The total number of electors represent the total number of U.S. senators, 100 (two per state); the total number of state representatives, 435; and three more electors for the District of Columbia.
“When we vote for president, we are actually voting for the electors of our state to go vote for the president,” said Erin Merrill, a middle school teacher in Manassas, Virginia, and one of three recipients for the American Civic Education Teachers Award in 2020. “But most of us don’t even know who the electors of our state are unless we’ve done our research.”
The state parties appoint electors to cast the electoral ballots on the Monday after the second Wednesday in December of the presidential election – about a month after Americans cast their ballots.
How are the votes divided?
The Electoral College is widely known as a “winner take all” systembecause the winner of the popular vote in each state gets all of the state’s electoral votes. The exceptions are Maine and Nebraska, which award their electoral votes more proportionally.
How is a winner selected?
It takes 270 ormore electoral votes to win a presidential election.
In 2016, Trumpwon with 304 electoral votes. It was the fifth time in American history that the winner of the presidential election lost the popular vote. And itwas the second time since 2000 – when Al Gore won the popular vote but George W. Bush won the Electoral College – that a candidate lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College.
Why do we keep it?
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California at Berkley and a constitutional scholar, said a key thing to understand about Electoral College is “it proportionately favors smaller states over larger states.”
Each state, no matter how big or small, gets the same number of electors for its two senators. That means California, the most populous state, gets no more electors per senator than Wyoming, the least populous state in the country. Based on population, this leaves Wyoming and other smaller states with more electors per resident than California and other big states.
Also at issue: The Electoral College incentivizes presidents to campaign in “swing states” – Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania to name a few – far more than in big states such as California and Texas, where the election outcomes are more predictable.
And California, Texas and other big states are forced to live with the system because there are too many smaller states that would fight off a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College, Chemerinsky said.
It would take three-quarters of the states to pass a constitutional amendment. “And you’re not going to get threequarters of the states to agree (to the amendment),” Chemerinsky said.
Can it be trusted?
Occasionally, rogue electors objecting to the Electoral College outcome have cast their ballot for the candidate who failed to win the popular vote in their state but won the overall popular vote. People were clamoring for electors to do just that after the 2016 election.
It didn’t happen then, and now it’s even more unlikely. In July, the Supreme Court restricted the power of these “faithless electors” by ruling the states can require them to support the winner of the popular vote in those states. In 32 states, rogue electors face fines and the possibility of being replaced.
Why do we have it?
This is what the Founding Fathers agreed upon at the Constitutional Convention in 1787.
“When the Constitution was written, most Americans weren’t educated, weren’t allowed to vote or weren’t able to know who was running, and that’s partly why this systemwas created: because they couldn’t necessarily trust the average voter to be informed enough,” said Merrill, the middle school civics teacher from Virginia. “I wouldn’t necessarily say that’s true nowadays.”
Slavery also played a role, Chemerinsky said. If the Founding Fathers had decided the popular vote would determine the presidency, enslaved people would have had no impact on the election because they were not allowed to vote. But the Electoral College allowed slaves to be counted as three-fifths of a person in determining how many electors each state got. “So Southern states got a benefit in the allocation of electors,” Chemerinsky said.
A little Constitutional reading helps understand how the Founding Fathers settled on the Electoral College, said Emma Humphries, chief education officer and deputy director of an iCivics program called CivXNow, founded by retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor as a way to make civics more engaging.
“If you read the Federalist Papers – if you’re ever having trouble sleeping at night, I highly recommend them – you can start to understand why they did it that way,” she said. “So much of our systemis built around compromises, so they can get the thing done, so they can get enough signatures at the (Constitutional) Convention and ultimately enough states to ratify it to move it forward.
“The strongest argument against the Electoral College is sort of what we saw 2016, that you have a candidate who does not receive the popular vote is outvoted by 3 million votes and still claims the White House.
“On the flip side, if we didn’t have it, some of those big states on the coast would determine the winner and those mid-Atlantic states and smaller states would feel like they’re not represented by the person in the Oval Office.”
The Electoral College is the system that in 2016 made Donald Trump president even though Hillary Clinton won the popular vote.