October 7, 2024

In what’s becoming a bit of a Monday tradition, let’s do a deep dive on one aspect of the American election system: The Electoral College. This has become an increasingly controversial aspect, particularly since the candidates who won the most popular votes in the elections of 2000 and 2016 still lost the presidency. How did that happen? And why do we have this system in the first place?

What Are the Basics?

So, in the United States, the president is not elected by the results of the national popular vote; instead, the voters select a total of 538 “electors”, who then in turn vote for the president. The electors themselves are indeed real people — usually political party officials or supporters from each state — and each state gets the same number of electors as it has representatives in the House of Representatives and the Senate (so a minimum of 3 each — two senators and at least 1 representative), including the District of Columbia (they get the same number as if they were an actual state).

As I mentioned in a post last week, most states do a winner-take-all approach, meaning that even if the vote totals for Pennsylvania are 50.1% vs 49.9%, the winner would get all 19 votes. (Maine and Nebraska are the only two to split things out slightly differently; read the above-mentioned post for more on that.)

How Did 2016 Happen?

It’s due to this little winner-take-all quirk that the popular and electoral votes occasionally have been out of sync with each other five times in our country’s history. In 2016, even though millions of more people voted for Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump still won the presidency — largely because of the votes from California, Texas, and Pennsylvania (population changes account for the differences between the electoral vote numbers listed below and the current map above):

• CA: 8.7 million voted for Clinton, and 4.5 million voted for Trump, so 55 electoral votes went to the Democrats
• TX: 4.7 million Trump vs 3.9 million Clinton votes meant 38 EVs went to the Republicans
• PA: 2.97 million Trump vs 2.93 million Clinton votes meant 20 more EVs went to the Republicans

If you add just these up, you get 15.66 million Clinton votes vs 12.14 million Trump votes, but 55 Democratic electors vs 58 Republican electors. And with the rest of the states added up like this, Republicans hit the 270 EV threshold before Democrats did. Due to the way the EVs are allocated, it’s estimated that Republicans have a built-in 4 to 5 percentage point advantage in winning the Electoral College in any given year.

Who Came Up With This, Anyway?

This all came from the Founding Fathers, of course; and more specifically, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton working up a bunch of compromises that made precisely nobody happy. They had just fought a war over a tyrannical king, so electing a chief executive appealed to all of them. However, there was really no good idea on how to do it. One faction felt that Congress shouldn’t have anything to do with it, ensuring a check between the legislative and executive branches. Another group felt that the vast majority of the common people lacked the information to be fully knowledgeable of the candidates, and that a charismatic, populist person appealing directly to the common man could have a dangerous amount of power. That’s where the idea of the electors themselves as an intermediary came into being.

And as for how many electors each state got? That’s where the infamous Three-Fifths Compromise came into play. If electors were based just on voting populations — and since voting itself was strictly the purview of white men — that meant roughly 40 percent of the population of Southern states (i.e., enslaved Black people) couldn’t vote, and the Southern states’ preferences would be overwhelmed by the Northern states. But with the Three-Fifths Compromise (where three-fifths of the enslaved Black population would be counted toward allocating representatives and electors, among other things), that ensured power for the Southern states (e.g., among the original 13 states, Virginia had roughly a quarter of all EVs alone), which in turn, secured the ratification of the Constitution.

When Did Things Go Wrong?

Almost immediately, the Electoral College failed to live up to the Founders’ hopes. The Founders had initially assumed that, with multiple candidates, very seldom would the majority of electors go to a single candidate, and in that case, the decision would go to the House of Representatives, where each state would get one vote. (This last happened in 1824.)

They had no idea that political parties would rise up, which would reduce the amount of viable candidates down to just two. Moreover, those parties would overtake the selection of electors and develop the winner-take-all plan that most states follow today, which completely upended the plans for educated, independent electors to make the actual decisions.

Why Can’t We Get Rid of It?

Naturally, the question of, “Why doesn’t someone do something to change this?” is answered by, “Because it’s up to Congress.” Actually abolishing the Electoral College would require an amendment to the Constitution — which needs two-thirds of Congress plus three-fourths of the states to all agree to it. And given the Republicans’ built-in Electoral College advantage, it’s highly unlikely that any of them would opt for this.

Where Do We Go From Here?

One thing the Constitution does not spell out is how states actually allocate their electoral votes. While the winner-take-all method is currently in favor in most states, there has been a movement to change that, known as the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. The NPVIC would allocate a state’s EVs to whichever presidential ticket wins the overall popular vote in the country as a whole. Since its introduction in 2006, seventeen states plus the District of Columbia have all signed onto this idea, with another three currently considering it. As of this writing, those areas control 259 EVs. If enough other states join in to get that number to 270, that would effectively end the occasional discrepancy between the Electoral College and the national popular vote. It seems unlikely to gain much more traction, though, with Republicans being the chief blocking points.

So for now, while both former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris will be courting every vote they can, they need to keep a closer eye on how those Electoral Votes add up.

For More Reading

• Al Jazeera: What is the Electoral College? What to know, in 500 words
• FactCheck.org: The Reason for the Electoral College
• History.com: Why Was the Electoral College Created?
• The National Archives: Electoral College Frequently Asked Questions
• Vox: The enormous advantage that the Electoral College gives Republicans, in one chart
• Wikipedia: National Popular Vote Interstate Compact