270 Votes to Win: The Electoral College in the United States
by Sarah Badawi
In a U.S. presidential election, voters do not directly vote for their chosen candidate. When they mark their ballots next to the names of the candidates they want as president and vice president, they’re actually voting for members of a body known as the Electoral College that will officially choose the president. Voters are choosing a slate (a group) of these electors in their state who are committed to a certain candidate. To win the presidency, a candidate needs at least 270 votes by electors nationwide out of the Electoral College’s total 538.
The Electoral College vote usually reflects the will of the general voting public, but not always. In four clear-cut instances, the Electoral College vote has gone against the popular vote. In 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes lost the popular vote by about 300,000 votes. In 1888, Benjamin Harrison lost by about 100,000. In 2000, George W. Bush lost by about 500,000 votes. In 2016, Donald J. Trump lost the popular vote by nearly three million. All four men won the Electoral College vote, however, and the presidency.
Americans’ opinion of the Electoral College is divided. In December 2016, the Gallup polling company found that 47% of Americans wanted to keep the Electoral College, an increase from 35% in 2004, while 49% wanted to amend the Constitution to switch to a national popular vote. However, a 2018 PRRI/The Atlantic poll found that 65% of Americans support a national popular vote, while only 32% support keeping the Electoral College. It seems safe to expect a lot more debate over this issue leading up to the national election in 2020. So how did the Electoral College come to be, and how exactly does it work?
Origins of the Electoral College
The framers of the Constitution debated extensively about how the president should be selected. Some were fearful of a direct democracy. Some believed that voters would not be well-informed enough to vote responsibly. Most did not take into account the role that political parties might play in the process. And framers from slave states wanted to avoid an election system that would place them at a disadvantage given their large but widely disenfranchised populations.
The framers eventually laid out the Electoral College system in Article II of the Constitution. Each state’s electors would vote for the president. Each state was given a number of electors equal to the total of its congressmen. It was left to the states to determine how those electors would be chosen. When all the electors’ votes were tallied in each state, the candidate receiving a majority of the electors’ votes from across the nation would be elected president. The person with the second highest vote count would be vice president.
But the first two presidential elections under the rules set out in Article II revealed serious flaws in this system. After George Washington’s retirement, the election of 1796 was the first contested presidential election in U.S. history. Party politics and failed partisan schemes within the Electoral College resulted in the first and only time in U.S. history that a president and vice president came from different political parties: John Adams, a Federalist, became president, and Thomas Jefferson, a Democratic-Republican, became vice president.
Four years later in the election of 1800, each state was free to determine the time and method for choosing its electors. So the election dragged on from April until December. When the Electoral College finally did vote, the result was a tie between Thomas Jefferson and his candidate for vice president Aaron Burr. It was up to the House of Representatives to break the tie, and it took them 36 votes to do so, finally in favor of Jefferson, who then became president.
Changes Under the 12th Amendment
Seeking to avoid further turmoil in the next presidential election, Congress took up the issue and passed the 12th Amendment, which was ratified by enough states by June 1804 to go into effect. Under the 12th Amendment, each state still gets a number of electors equal to the number of members in the House of Representatives for that state plus its two U.S. senators. An important change, however, was that electors would cast one vote for president and a separate vote for vice president (to avoid the Jefferson-Burr situation of 1800).
Furthermore, the Jeffersonians in Congress who dominated the debate on the amendment stressed the importance of majority rule. So they set up a system that they believed would reflect and preserve that goal. It was a system they thought would translate into a candidate winning a majority of Electoral College votes by winning the majority of support within the states.
The Electoral College Today
The 12th Amendment still left it up to the state legislatures to determine how their state’s electors would be selected, as well as how their electoral votes would be awarded. Today, each state has its own rules for nominating these slates of electors, and sometimes these rules even vary by political party. Then, it is decided through a popular vote in each state on Election Day which group of electors will cast that state’s votes for president and vice president. On an appointed date after Election Day, the electors meet in their respective states and cast their votes for president. (The electors do not ever meet all together in one place.)
But not quite every state awards their electoral votes in the same way. Forty-eight out of 50 states have moved away from the majority-rule rationale behind the 12th Amendment. In all states except Maine and Nebraska, whichever candidate gets the most votes, even if it’s not a majority, gets all of that state’s electoral votes. This is known as a plurality winner-take-all system. The table below shows how this works in practice in very close races.
Maine and Nebraska are the only two states that do not have a winner-take-all system of assigning electoral votes. They both use what is known as the Congressional District Method, in which one electoral vote is assigned to each congressional district, and then the statewide winner of the popular vote gets the state’s other two electoral votes. (Remember: the number of electoral votes each state has is equal to one per congressional district plus two for the number of senators each state has).
Under this system, it is possible for electoral votes to be shared between candidates. In the 2016 presidential election, for example, Hillary Clinton got three of Maine’s electoral votes, and Donald Trump got one.
Given today’s electoral complexities, what are the main arguments behind Americans’ divided opinion on the Electoral College?
Arguments Against the Electoral College
1. It allows a president to be elected who does not win the popular vote. This has occurred at least four times.
2. It undermines the fundamental democratic principle of “one person, one vote.” Since every state gets at least three electoral votes regardless of the state’s population, the influence of voters in small states is artificially inflated. For example, under the current system, each elector for California — the most populous state in the union — represents 712,000 residents of that state. Each elector for Wyoming — the least populous state in the union — represents about 193,000 residents. In fact, the District of Columbia (whose residents have only been able to vote in presidential elections since the ratification of the 23rd Amendment in 1961) has the same number of electoral votes as Wyoming but has almost 135,000 more residents.
3. Deadlocks can happen. A third-party candidate or a close election can prevent any candidate from getting a majority of Electoral College votes. When no one candidate captures a majority of electoral votes, the House of Representatives — with each state delegation having just one vote — decides who is president. This has occurred twice in our history (in 1800 and 1824). On four other occasions, including the hard-fought elections of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and John F. Kennedy in 1960, elections came within just 30,000 votes of having to be decided by the House, with three additional close calls in the elections of 1912, 1924, and 1968.
4. The Electoral College may hold down voter turnout. If opinion polls show one candidate far ahead in a state, then voters in that state who prefer another candidate may not bother to vote, figuring that their vote won’t really affect the outcome of the election. And U.S. territories such as Puerto Rico and American Samoa have no electors at all, so residents of those territories cannot vote in presidential elections, even though they are U.S. citizens.
5. The Electoral College leads candidates to largely ignore states — large or small — that are either solidly “blue” or solidly “red.” They concentrate their efforts and attention almost exclusively on so-called battleground or swing states that have many votes in the Electoral College. In the final months of the 2016 campaign, candidates Trump and Clinton made a combined 178 campaign trips to 24 states, but 111 of those trips were visits to just six battleground states (Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia).
Arguments for the Electoral College
1. The Electoral College is a reflection of our federal system as described in the U.S. Constitution. It properly places power with states and their representatives rather than the national government.
2. No one region in the U.S. (South, Midwest, Northeast, etc.) controls enough electoral votes to elect a president all by itself. Therefore, successful presidential candidates must appeal to voters across multiple regions. This gives candidates for the presidency an incentive to campaign in smaller swing states with significantly large rural areas. For example, Donald Trump held rallies in Iowa, Nevada, and New Hampshire in the general election in 2016, even though those states have relatively few electoral votes. Iowa is in the Midwest, Nevada is in the Southwest, and New Hampshire is in the Northeast.
3. It has contributed to political stability by promoting the two-party system, which encourages the major parties to represent a wide range of interests. Since the first presidential election under our Constitution in 1788, third parties have only won one or more electoral votes 12 times. In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt from the Progressive Party, a third party, won six states and their electoral votes. He beat the Republican candidate William Howard Taft, but both lost to the Democrat Woodrow Wilson. The last third party candidate to win any electoral votes was George Wallace in 1968, who appealed to white racists with a pro-segregation platform and won five Southern states. He still came nowhere near to winning that year’s general election.
4. It is the system we have and in which candidates and the public know how to operate. Any change to it could bring negative unanticipated consequences. For example, the 12th Amendment was ratified in 1804 to solve problems in the previous two elections. Its supporters intended to instill majority rule in how states’ electors voted. Today, however, 48 out of 50 states use a plurality winner-take-all system rather than a simple majority-rule system in electoral votes.
5. Switching to a national popular vote, in particular, could require significant changes to who runs elections and how. Article II of the Constitution leaves it up to states to decide how to appoint electors, as long as the number equals the number of senators and congressional representatives. A national popular vote would take that power from the states entirely. It is extremely rare to get states to ratify any constitutional amendment. This one would be just as difficult, if not more so. It could also open the door to problems for the federal government in administering an election across 50 states. Imagine contested results in multiple states. That would be even harder to manage and resolve than, for example, the recount in the single state of Florida in 2000.
This article was originally published in the Fall 2019 issue of Bill of Rights in Action (BRIA), the quarterly curricular magazine of Constitutional Rights Foundation. Click here for a classroom activity on this article, plus writing and discussion questions for use with high school students. You can also subscribe to BRIA for free here.
