America 101: Why the Electoral College?

When Hillary Clinton received nearly 3 million more votes than Donald Trump in 2016, many Americans wondered how on earth Trump managed to get into the Oval Office. Of course, they knew how: Trump received 304 Electoral College votes, a solid 34 more than is needed to win the presidency. But not a lot of people understand why the Electoral College exists – or how it works. And though a sizeable majority of Americans say they’d just like to get rid of it, the Electoral College was integral to the 1787 compromise that was the Constitution. Put simply, without the Electoral College, we probably wouldn’t have a United States.

Established by Article II, Section I of the Constitution, the Electoral College calls for the creation every four years of a temporary group of electors equal to the total number of representatives in Congress.

Electors, often chosen for their service to and support of a political party, are typically nominated at state party conventions and then voted on by the delegates. After this initial phase of the process, each party’s presidential candidate emerges with their own slate of potential electors. When Americans cast their ballot for president and vice president on the first Tuesday in November, they are technically casting a ballot for the slate of electors who have pledged to cast their votes for that party.

It is this group of 538 people – the formula is the same that gives us 100 senators and 435 representatives (plus three electors representing Washington D.C.) who meet in their respective states and cast their official votes for president and vice president on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December.

Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia have a winner-take-all system, in which the party whose candidate wins the popular vote in a state appoints all that state’s electors to the Electoral College. Maine and Nebraska have a “district system.” They appoint electors depending on who won the popular vote in each congressional district, plus two electors who are pledged to vote for the overall winner of the state’s popular vote.

Whichever candidate wins at least 270 electors – half of all electors plus one – will win the presidency. If this all seems a bit clunky, it’s because it is. The Electoral College was never intended to be the “perfect” system for picking the president, said George Edwards III, emeritus political science professor at Texas A&M University. 

“It wasn’t like the Founders said, ‘Hey, what a great idea! This is the preferred way to select the chief executive, period,’” said Edwards. “They were tired, impatient, frustrated. They cobbled together this plan because they couldn’t agree on anything else.”

It was summer 1787 in Philadelphia. A dissatisfied colonial elite joined together to rewrite the Articles of Confederation, which had been working more as a treaty between independent countries than a national constitution. There was no real central leadership under the Articles of Confederation, and Congress had no power to enforce laws, tax its citizens, or regulate trade. Foreign policy and defense were also individualized, making for a vulnerable confederation.

The men who gathered in Pennsylvania that year – and, yes they were all men (and all white, too) – knew they needed a central government but were deeply distrustful of executive power. After all, the bloody revolution they fought to free themselves from a tyrannical king was only a decade past. The men argued about everything, from the judicial to the legislative to the executive, for months on end.

Having decided that the office of the presidency would be a one-person gig, it was a foregone conclusion that George Washington would be the first person to hold it. But by what method would he be chosen? The delegates to the Constitutional Convention had to devise the system that would elect Washington – and everyone who came after him.

One group of delegates thought Congress shouldn’t have anything to do with picking the president, because such a system would open the door to corruption. Another faction was hell-bent against letting the people elect the president by popular vote. They viewed the American people as largely ignorant and feared a “democratic mob” could easily steer the country astray, especially if the people fell prey to the charisma of a populist candidate.

Out of these debates came a compromise – one neither side was entirely happy with – based on the idea of electoral mediators appointed by individual states. The number of electors assigned to each state corresponds to the “Great Compromise” of the Philadelphia convention, or the establishment of equal representation in the Senate and proportional representation in the House of Representatives.

Under the Articles of Confederation, every state enjoyed one vote, independent of their population. States with smaller populations were not willing to give this power up. Roger Sherman, a delegate from Connecticut, noted that “the smaller states would never agree to the plan on any other principle than an equality of suffrage.”

States with larger populations, on the other hand, believed that the people’s power should be reflected at the national level. They wanted a one-person, one-vote system. A plan that proposed a unicameral (one-house) legislature in which each state had a single vote was quickly shot down by these bigger states.

Neither group would have signed a constitution that did not include a compromise, which is how we got a bicameral (two-house) legislature, in which each state gets equal representation in the Senate (two representatives) and population-based representation in the House of Representatives.

Now, back to the Electoral College, which was set up under the same logic as the Congress. The number of electors assigned to each state is equal to the number of senators assigned to each state – plus the number of House of Representatives members assigned to each state, as per the Great Compromise. Thus, the electors of states with smaller populations have slightly more influence (proportional to population) over the presidency than the electors of states with larger populations. It is for this reason that a candidate could win the popular vote yet still lose the presidency. 

Donald Trump wasn’t the only candidate to reach 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. this way. In elections of 2000, 1888, 1876, and 1824, candidates who lost the popular vote won in the Electoral College and became president. However, the election of 1824 doesn’t really count because it was unique for all kinds of interesting reasons and is a fascinating case study of the intricacies of America’s electoral processes. But that’s a story for another day.

The system might not be perfect, but our Founding Fathers thought it the best possible compromise for the issue of electing the president and in turn, the most likely system to result in the ratification of the Constitution. Has it outlived its usefulness? Most Democrats, who were only on the losing end of this system in 2000 and 2016 – and fear it might happen again this year – think so. But it’s also true that the Electoral College has saved us a lot of headaches over the years. Washington Post columnist George Will points out that the 1960 election would have been an administrative disaster were it not for the system:

“John F. Kennedy’s popular vote margin over Richard M. Nixon was just 118,574,” wrote Will. “If all 68,838,219 popular votes had been poured into a single national bucket, there would have been powerful incentives to challenge the results in many of the nation’s 170,000 precincts.”

See guys? It’s not all bad!