What Is the Electoral College Anyway? Here’s a Helpful Primer

To many Americans, even those who are well informed, the Electoral College seems to be a shadowy, labyrinthine process for deciding elections. Every four years, Americans head to the ballot boxes and cast their votes for their preferred candidate without realizing the total of their votes do not necessarily elect the president. That's where the Electoral College comes in, serving as a compromise between citizens and legislators while acting as a stalwart against nefarious strategies to ensure a certain candidate wins.

Suffice it to say, that the Electoral College is not a simple process. It requires coordination between millions of votes and a constellation of state legislators. More importantly, it rests on a gentleman's agreement between the people and the state. While many view the Electoral College as undemocratic, others see it as a suitable compromise between the will of the people and the machinations of government. In this article, we will attempt to explain the Electoral College and its consequences in the clearest, simplest terms possible. (For more on elections, discover the states where it's hardest to vote by mail.)

To compile an article explaining the Electoral College, 24/7 Tempo consulted a range of political, judicial, and research publications including The Bipartisan Policy Center, USA.gov, and the Brookings Institute. Next, we laid out the complicated Electoral College voting process in the simplest terms possible. After that, we confirmed aspects of our research using the National Archives and the Brennan Center.

The Founding Fathers created the Electoral College when they first formulated the United States Constitution. By doing this, they fabricated a middle ground of oversight between the American public and their political representatives. Though it's not without its faults, it acts as something of a compromise between the election of a President by popular vote and the election of a president by Congressional vote.

As opposed to a real place, the Electoral College is a process by which the president is elected. Through Article II, Section 1, clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution, the process establishes a collection of intermediaries. These intermediaries come from each of the 50 states, with the number of presidential electors equal to the number of a given state's senators and representatives from the House of Representatives.

That said, each state receives at least two electoral votes. One of those votes comes from the state's senator. The other votes from said state are equal to its number of representatives in the House of Representatives. This way, even the least populous state receives three electoral votes. Since the states with larger populations have a larger contingent of representatives, they have a larger number of electoral votes. As such, a state's number of electoral votes shifts in tandem with its population. For example, California has the largest number of electoral votes at 55. Even the least populous states, however, still receive three electoral votes each.

While it waxes and wanes with the country's population, the Electoral College currently features 538 members. For a presidential candidate to win an election, they must secure a majority, which is at least 270 votes. Thanks to the features written into the Constitution, state legislatures have the power to decide how they choose their electors. When the Electoral College was first established, most state legislatures chose their electors directly. During the 19th century, however, a majority of states transitioned to a popular vote process. Nowadays, all 50 states go by way of the popular vote. This means they award their electoral votes to whoever was chosen by the people through the state's popular vote.

That said, a few states go about the process differently. Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia operate on a winner-takes-all system, meaning they give all their electoral votes to whoever wins the popular vote. Maine and Nebraska, however, operate differently. These two states provide a single electoral vote to the winner of the popular vote in their congressional districts. Their two remaining votes go to the stateside winner. As such, these states have been known to split their votes between candidates.

During the lead-up to the presidential election, each state's political parties usually nominate their roster of tentative electors. If one party receives the state's popular vote, their chosen people become its electors. Once chosen, the Electoral College members meet and vote in each state after Election Day, typically on the Monday after the second Wednesday in December. A little over a month later, on Jan. 6, Congress calls a joint session in the Capitol. There, all the electoral votes are counted and Congress officially declares the winner of the presidential election. If all goes according to plan, the new president is inaugurated on Jan. 20.

Upon convening for the Constitutional Convention in 1787, the Founding Fathers quickly realized they needed a compromise for elections. Some delegates wanted Congress to elect the president while others thought it should come down to a popular vote by the people. To solve the problem, they created the Electoral College. This accounted for delegates from both schools of thought. The people would get their nationwide vote, but state legislators would also get a say in the process.

Article II of the Constitution further clarified this procedure. Though the Article mostly spoke on the creation of the Executive branch of the federal government, it also included the Electoral College. Originally, electors cast two votes for president. Whoever received the most votes became president and second place became vice president. In 1804, the process was reformulated with ratifications to the 12th Amendment. This made electors cast votes for president and vice president separately.

It should be noted, however, that slavery was alive and well during the creation of the Electoral College. At the time, free Northern states and slave-owning Southern states featured similarly sized populations. Since enslaved people comprised about one-third of the Southern states' population, southern delegates criticized the popular vote since it would give Northern states a considerable advantage. These circumstances undoubtedly contributed to the creation of the Electoral College. The Founding Fathers also applied the three-fifths rule to appease Southern legislators. Three out of 5 enslaved people were counted in a state's population even though they could not vote. This Southern electoral advantage gave Southern slaveholding politicians a steady win rate in presidential elections for much of the 19th century. Even in the contemporary era, this effect is noticeable in the electoral choices of Southern states. (For candidates through the years, learn which presidents political scientists ranked from worst to best.)

Though it's unlikely, if no one wins a majority of Electoral College votes, the election is sent to the House of Representatives for what is called a runoff. When this happens, each state gets a single vote decided by the political party that controls each state's House delegation. Simultaneously, the vice presidential race is sent to the Senate, which also receives one vote per state. A scenario like this has not happened since 1836. At that time, the Senate decided on the vice president since no candidate received a majority of electoral votes.

Just because the Electoral College articulates a clear, powers-checked process, it doesn't mean voting always goes as planned. Since reforms took place in the 19th century, the government expects state electors to uphold the will of the voters. This is something of a handshake agreement, however, since the Constitution does not explicitly require electors to honor the popular vote. This unacknowledged loophole sometimes results in electors voting against the popular vote. It's rare, but it happens. There were 90 instances of faithless electors out of 23,507 total votes in all presidential elections up until 2016. That same year, however, the presidential election had a record-breaking seven faithless electors.

As it stands currently, the District of Columbia and 33 states require electors to vote for their pledged candidates. That said, only five states penalize faithless electors, with 14 other states requiring faithless electors to be removed or have their votes canceled. To safeguard against this scenario, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld existing laws to punish or remove faithless electors in July 2020.

In the wake of the 2020 Election, President Donald Trump and his allies attempted to overturn the voting results, citing widespread voter fraud. Besides state legislatures attempting to nullify portions of their votes, several congressional members tried to throw out electors from certain states.

This exposed certain holes that Congress patched in 2023 when it passed The Electoral Count Reform Act. This more explicitly defined which state officials could appoint electors. More importantly, it ensured that such changes had to occur before Election Day. This keeps state legislatures from eschewing results not to their liking. Plus, the Act requires at least one-fifth of each chamber of the House to object to electoral votes instead of one representative and one senator. (For candidates who failed to win, discover America's most unconventional presidential hopefuls.)