10.5: The Electoral College

Presidential elections are the only American elections whose winners—the president and vice president—represent the entire country. As such, the Founders who designed the Constitution could not simply leave these elections entirely up to the states. States would still be responsible for administering elections, but an additional process would be needed to combine state-level results to determine a national winner.

What they devised was the Electoral College. Voters on Election Day often mistakenly believe they are casting their ballots for presidential candidates. In fact, they are casting them for slates of electors, 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 its number of seats in Congress (as shown in Figure 10.1 below). Pennsylvania, for instance, had 19 electors in 2024, two for its senators and 17 for its representatives. (Members of Congress themselves are constitutionally ineligible to serve as electors, to ensure the independence of the executive branch from Congress.) In 1960, the Twenty-Third Amendment added three additional electors chosen by the District of Columbia, bringing the total number of electors to 538.

Almost all states, as well as the District of Columbia, choose their electors on a winner-take-all basis. A presidential candidate can win a state by only one popular vote—that is, one vote by an average citizen—and still receive all of that state’s electoral votes. The two exceptions to this rule are Maine and Nebraska, which allow candidates who lose the statewide race to receive one electoral vote for each congressional district they win. Each of these states has split its electoral votes this way thrice. Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district went Democratic in 2008, 2020, and 2024, despite the state as a whole going Republican. Maine’s 2nd congressional district turned Republican red in 2016, 2020, and 2024 while the state overall remained Democratic blue.

Figure 10.1: Electoral College results, 2024 (Note: Harris and Walz won one of Nebraska’s electoral votes and Trump and Vance won one of Maine’s, as indicated by asterisks.)

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

Although states do differ in politics and culture, the red/blue divide is something of a mirage. Every state has both Democratic-leaning and Republican-leaning regions, and many are closely split between the two. Upon closer examination, America in general and most states in particular turn out to be more purple than red or blue.

A candidate must earn a majority of electoral votes to win the Electoral College. Since 1960, there have been 538 electors in total, making 270 the “magic number” to clinch the presidency. If no candidate wins 270 electoral votes, the House of Representatives chooses the president (with each state voting as a bloc) while the Senate chooses the vice president (with each senator voting individually). This tiebreak system was established by the Twelfth Amendment in 1803. However, it has only been used once, in 1824, when the House elected John Quincy Adams after no candidate won an electoral majority.

The Electoral College is highly controversial because it enables a candidate to lose the popular vote but still become president. The winner-take-all system, 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 spread efficiently across the states. 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.

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, offer several defenses of the status quo. Compared to a national popular vote, the Electoral College is more consistent with the American federal structure that reserves the power to administer elections for the states. It also prevents candidates from ignoring rural parts of the country in favor of major population centers. From a practical standpoint, the Electoral College tends to produce clear winners with large margins of victory and limits the potential negative impacts of recounts and voter fraud by confining them to the state or states in which they occur.

Opponents of the Electoral College are unpersuaded by these arguments. They contend that all of these perks 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 be greater than the costs.

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.