An American Game of Thrones
The Electoral College explained — in English, not Dothraki
By Manuel Chavira and Christopher Rosato, Jr.
The race for the Presidency is portrayed as a battle to win states and their electoral votes. That is why we created this project — to help explain the Electoral College, through Game of Thrones, in a more...relatable sense. Men and women have staked their claim for the Iron Throne of Westeros, and it could not be more relatable to the race for the White House.
The Mad King Aerys Targaryen II is dead, and Westeros is without a king for the first time in over 20 years. Men all throughout Westeros claim they should be the next king, so the houses need to come up with a plan to declare the next king.
The various houses, having far too many citizens for them all to be fully educated on the subtleties of ruling, decide that only the wisest men from each house should vote on who should rule Westeros next. These men will be called electors. This way, only the best-qualified men will be elected king.
The Lannisters, however, argue that they should have more say in the decision than the smaller houses because they have more citizens. They believe that since they have a larger population, that having an equal share of votes wouldn’t be fair. The Crown is also in debt to the Lannisters, so the Lannisters have a bit of pull here.
So an agreement was made that each house would get a certain number of electoral votes, according to how many citizens they had.
California, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, and Florida, having the largest populations, are entitled to the most electoral votes. Hillary Clinton won California, Illinois, and New York handily. In total, she won 104 electoral votes from these three states alone — meaning she needed 166 more electoral college votes to attain 270.
Each house’s citizens would vote for the wisest men in their house to become their electors. The winners would meet and vote on who they thought the next king of Westeros should be. Whoever received the majority of votes out of all of the electors from the various houses would become the next king.
Under this new system, Robert Baratheon is elected king, and successfully unites the Seven Kingdoms in peace for over 15 years. By all accounts, the Electoral College is a success, and the houses decide to use it again when Robert Baratheon dies from a totally-not-suspicious hunting accident.
However, men who are popular throughout various houses declare that they want to be king despite having no ruling experience. One such man is Robb Stark, who is very popular in the North. Citizens of House Stark and some surrounding areas want to make sure that the electors they elect will vote for Robb, but under the current system there is no way to guarantee this.
This is also true with Stannis Baratheon, who believes he is the rightful King in the Seven Kingdoms because his older brother, Robert, had no true-born heirs and Stannis was next in line. Stannis’s small group of followers want to ensure that their electors will vote for Stannis, but have no way of doing that.
Eventually, the men trying to become electors decided to pledge themselves to certain candidates so that citizens knew how each representative was going to vote. Then, to make things simpler, citizens would simply have to vote for one name — the candidate they wanted to be king. In the North, citizens would vote for Robb Stark, and all of the electors that had pledged to vote for him would be automatically elected.
Though this seemed to make the process of electing the King simpler to understand for citizens and more democratic, it weakened the entire system. Now, instead of having the wisest men in the land choosing who the next king should be, anyone who supports the most popular candidate in that house can become an elector.
When you vote for President, you play the role of the citizens of the houses of Westeros. You’re really voting for the list of electors pledged to that candidate, not for the candidate directly. Unless you live in Nebraska or Maine, whichever candidate wins the most votes from citizens like you receives all of your state’s electoral votes because all of the electors pledged to that candidate are automatically elected.
When they meet in your state’s capitol in December, they get to directly vote for the next president. In some states, they are required to vote for the candidate they are pledged to. In other states, they can vote for whoever they want, though rarely do they vote for anyone other than who they pledged to vote for. Whoever receives the majority of votes from all of the electors from all of the states becomes the next president.
Under the current system, Westeros seems to have elected Joffrey to be the next king to occupy the Red Keep, which will probably work out great for everyone. The United States doesn’t seem to have done much better, though, as Donald Trump is expected to be elected the next president to occupy the White House when the electoral college votes on December 19. If elected, Trump will be officially sworn in as President of the United States on January 20, 2017.
In other words, could Hillary Clinton still be elected as POTUS through the Electoral College? Yes, it may be constitutionally possible; but no, it will not happen, according to election experts. Secretary Clinton already conceded her defeat to Trump and accepted the outcome of her campaign efforts. In Westerosi culture, she “bent the knee” to Trump, meaning that Trump will sit atop the Iron Throne on January 20, 2017.
