Getting to Know the Electoral College, Issue II ~ Electoral College Admission Standards

Nathan Musgrove
Aug 22, 2017 · 4 min read

Ahh, the end of August. As waves of high school graduates begin their steady migration to college campuses around the country, they will do so fresh off the heels of an arduous application process replete with standardized tests, essays, letters of recommendation, and of course, plenty of anxiety. As application-hardened veterans, these students will find very little about the process of becoming one of the nation’s 538 electors that they can sympathize with.

Original image from Berna’s Vibe. Image modified by Voters for a Voice.

Although tens of millions of Americans “vote” in presidential elections, we are all really just voting to recommend a slate of electors from each given state. It is the vote of each of these 538 electors that ultimately determines the president of the United States, and in this light, you might say these individuals are “important.” But who gets into this school, anyway?

Prior to election day, each state will receive and approve a list of electors (equal to that state’s total number of electoral votes) from either the candidates’ political parties or from the candidates themselves. Although some states may specify how a party chooses its electors, every single state allows the candidate’s political party to choose its representatives in the electoral college (find out how your state chooses its electors with this nifty table). Should a candidate win the popular vote in his/her state, their chosen electors will become members of the 538 citizens casting the actual ballots for president.

O.k., so political parties choose the electors? Who do they choose?? The Constitution provides some basic rules for who cannot be an elector (e.g. an elected official in federal office), but for all intents and purposes, electors can be practically anyone. In practice, the parties will select a group of individuals it has the utmost confidence will vote for their candidate if their candidate wins.

As a result, electors are often high-ranking party members or otherwise established friends of the party. Being appointed an elector is a largely ceremonious gesture typically used to reward loyal party members. In 2016, the Democratic electors representing the state of New York included the Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Mayor of New York City and even former President and prospective First Man, Bill Clinton (you can find your state’s electors in the 2016 presidential election here).

Image by chasensmith (Redbubble)

As we learned in Issue I of this series, some of the nation’s founders (e.g. Alexander Hamilton) envisioned the electoral college as a class of educated elites capable of guiding the public to electing the best presidential candidate, vesting them with the few actual votes for president. As we will discuss in coming issues, the current system largely relies upon applying political pressure to college members to ensure a vote along party lines — but this doesn’t always work.

The 538 members of the electoral college are charged with a task of serious consequence. Each member represents between 200,000 and 800,000 American citizens and suffers little or no legal consequence for voting their conscience. With such power and autonomy, we leave the choice of this college’s members to the political parties (of course, the only institutions we can truly trust with decisions of such importance). These parties will select the individuals they believe have the most to lose for voting against the party’s candidate, and in this way, each state essentially strong-arms its electors into voting for the candidate who won the state’s popular vote. With such an efficient and foolproof process, it’s a wonder many countries scratch their heads when trying to understand our method of presidential election.

Stay tuned for next week’s issue: Issue III ~ What Happens on Election Day?, in which we’ll explore what, in terms of electing the next president, actually happens on election day.

References: See links throughout article for source material. For further reading, I encourage readers to explore this report by Thomas H. Neale. All opinions in this article are my own and are not intended to reflect the thoughts or opinions of referenced materials.


Interested in learning more about the electoral college, how it works and what gets us so wound up about it? Check out our website and past/upcoming issues in this “Getting to Know the Electoral College” series:

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