10.4: The Electoral College

Presidential elections are the only American elections in which the winners — who become the president and vice president — represent the entire country rather than just part of it. As such, the Founders who designed the Constitution could not simply leave the electoral details up to the states to figure out for themselves. States were still responsible for administering elections using their reserved powers, but the Founders needed to establish an additional process to combine these state-level results and use them to select a president.

What they devised was the Electoral College. Voters on Election Day often believe they are casting their ballots for presidential candidates, when in fact they are casting them for slates of electors, who are usually loyal party members picked by their preferred candidate’s campaign. Roughly one month after Election Day, the winning slates of electors meet in the capitals of the states that elected them and cast their votes for a presidential candidate. It is the electoral vote (the votes of these electors), not the popular vote (the votes of average citizens), which determines the winner of the presidential election.

By law, each state chooses a number of electors equal to the number of members of Congress it has (as shown in Figure 10.1 below). Pennsylvania, for instance, had 20 electors in 2020: two for its two U.S. senators, and 18 for its 18 U.S. representatives. Although each state’s members of Congress are the basis for calculating its number of electoral votes, the Constitution specifies that members of Congress cannot serve as electors themselves, to ensure that the executive branch remains independent from Congress. Since the ratification of the Twenty-Third Amendment in 1960, the District of Columbia has had three electoral votes, even though it has no voting representation in Congress. In total, the Electoral College has 538 electors.

Figure 10.1: Electoral College results, 2020 (Note: Biden and Harris won one of Nebraska’s electoral votes and Trump and Pence won one of Maine’s, as indicated by asterisks.)

Almost all states, as well as the District of Columbia, choose their electors on a winner-take-all basis. Even if a presidential candidate wins a state by only one popular vote — that is, one vote by an average citizen — he or she receives all of that state’s electoral votes. The two exceptions to this rule are Maine and Nebraska, both of which allow candidates who lose the statewide race to receive one electoral vote for each congressional district they win within the state. Each of these states has split its electoral votes this way twice: Nebraska’s 2^nd congressional district went Democratic in 2008 and 2020 despite the state as a whole going Republican, and Maine’s 2^nd congressional district turned Republican red in 2016 and 2020 while the state overall remained Democratic blue.

Red and blue are commonly used to symbolize Republicans and Democrats, respectively. This tendency dates to the 2000 presidential election, during which major television networks settled on this color scheme for displaying the Electoral College map. Since then, politicians, journalists, and average citizens have described America’s political divide as being between “red states” and “blue states.”

Although it is true that states differ in their political and cultural perspectives, the red/blue divide is to a certain extent a mirage. Every state has both Democratic-leaning and Republican-leaning regions, and many states are closely split between the two. Which color is more prominent matters in the winner-take-all Electoral College, but on closer examination America as a whole and most states turn out to be more “purple” than “red” or “blue.”

To win the Electoral College and therefore the presidency, a candidate must earn at least 270 electoral votes. If no candidate wins an Electoral College majority, the House of Representatives chooses the president (with each state voting as a bloc, rather than each member voting individually) while the Senate chooses the vice president (with each senator voting individually). This tiebreak system was established with the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment in 1803 and has only been used once: in 1824, when the House elected John Quincy Adams after none of the four candidates won a majority of electoral votes.

The Electoral College is one of the most controversial aspects of American elections, because it enables a candidate to lose the popular vote but still be elected president. The winner-take-all mechanism by which most states choose their electors, combined with the fact that electoral votes are not distributed perfectly proportionally according to states’ populations, means that the candidate who finishes second in the popular vote can nonetheless win a majority of electoral votes if his or her popular support is more efficiently spread across the states than his or her opponent’s. Five U.S. presidents — John Quincy Adams in 1824, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, George W. Bush in 2000, and Donald Trump in 2016 — have won the presidency despite losing the popular vote.

The word ballot comes from the white and black ballotte (Italian for “small balls”) used to cast anonymous votes in the Republic of Venice — and in the early United States, as in the case of this ballot box from a social club in Washington, DC.

This anti-majoritarian aspect is the most common complaint levied against the Electoral College, especially by supporters of popular-vote winners who lost the electoral vote. Proponents of the Electoral College — especially supporters of popular-vote losers who won the electoral vote — argue that the Electoral College preserves the federal nature of the American political system, prevents candidates from ignoring rural areas of the country in favor of big population centers, and reduces the impact of both voter fraud and recounts by ensuring they only affect the election results of the state(s) in which they occur.

Opponents of the Electoral College contend that these qualities are outweighed by the violation of majority rule. It is true that the Electoral College has sided against the majority of voters in the past and could easily do so again in the future. But it is also true that other American political institutions, from the Bill of Rights (which protects minority rights) to the U.S. Senate (which empowers small states at large states’ expense) to representative democracy itself (which empowers politicians to act against their constituents’ wishes) can do and have done the same. The question is not whether the Electoral College — or any aspect of American politics, for that matter — is anti-majoritarian, but rather whether the benefits of a more majoritarian process would outweigh the costs.