What is the Electoral College?
The White House, seen above, is the official residence of the U.S. president.
Voters in U.S. presidential elections do not vote directly for the president.
Instead, every state is allocated electors equal to the number of senators plus representatives it has in Congress. (You can learn about how senators and representatives are allocated to states here.)
For example, California, like every state, has two senators. And it has 53 representatives in the House. So California is allocated 55 electors for the purposes of presidential elections.
On election day, voters cast a ballot for their preferred candidate.
The candidate that receives the most votes in a particular state gets all the electoral college votes from that state. For example, in the 2008 election, Barack Obama received more votes than John McCain in California, and therefore, received all 55 of California’s electoral votes.
The candidate that receives 270 or more electoral votes wins the election.
This electoral college system makes it possible for a candidate to win a presidential election despite receiving less votes than their opponent (i.e. lose the popular vote but win the electoral college).
There have been two instances in the 21st century when the candidate receiving less votes won the election: George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016.
Let’s consider the case of the 2000 presidential election. Al Gore received a total of 543,895 more votes nationally than his opponent George W. Bush. However, because of the heavy concentration of Gore’s votes in states with large urban cities such as New York, Chicago and San Francisco, he won only 20 states plus the District of Columbia compared to Bush’s 30 states. And the sum total of the electoral votes of Bush’s 30 states got him over the required 270 electoral vote threshold.
The 2016 presidential election resulted in an even larger discrepancy between the popular and electoral votes. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by more than 2.8 million votes. However, again because of the concentration of her votes in large urban population centers, her opponent, Donald Trump, was able to win the electoral college.
The electoral college system also means that some people’s votes hold more weight than others.
For example, consider the value of a Californian’s vote relative to that of a Wyoming voter.
California had 55 electoral votes for its estimated 2017 population of 39,536,653 people. So in California there was one electoral vote for every 718,848 people.
On the other hand, rural Wyoming had 3 electoral votes for an estimated 2017 population of 579,315. So in Wyoming, there was one electoral vote for every 193,105 people.
The result is that the votes of Californians, New Yorkers, and residents of other states with large urban cities count less than those of more sparsely populated rural states like Wyoming and North Dakota.
Moreover, the electoral college contributes to a depression of voter turnout in so called “safe states.”
For example, the state of New York, with the reliably Democratic metropolis of New York City, is often considered a safe Democratic Party state: the city of New York with its population north of 8 million that is majority democratic will likely mean the state is going to give all its electoral votes to the democratic candidate.
This feeling of pre-determination can reduce the incentive for voters to show up on election day.
Likewise, Kentucky is considered a reliable Republican Party state, which can lead voters to stay home.
Other states like Ohio and Florida which sometimes vote Republican and other times votes Democrat, so-called “swing states,” do not create such disincentive because voters may feel their vote could make a difference in which candidate gets all of that state’s electoral votes.
This depression in voter turnout in “safe states” creates a distortion of the democratic process: if there were no electoral college would more voters have turned out and shrunk the gap between Trump and Clinton in the popular voter? Or would more people have shown up to vote for Clinton in 2016 and stretch her popular vote lead further? The vote tally says that 48% of voters who turned up on election day preferred Clinton and 45.9% preferred Trump. Did these figures accurately reflect actual preferences across the entire electorate?
Many have called for the electoral college system to be eliminated, for these very reasons: it allows a candidate receiving less votes to win the election, makes some votes count more than others, and disincentivizes voter turnout in “safe states.”
But such a change would be difficult to attain because it would require an amendment to the constitution.
There is currently a push at the state level to work around the electoral college.
Eleven states plus the District of Columbia have agreed to pool all their electoral college votes for the candidate that wins the popular vote.
However, for the pact to work, states with a combined total of 270 of more electoral votes would have to agree to it. Currently the electoral vote total of the 12 jurisdictions that have joined is 172.
A major obstacle to reaching the 270 mark is the likely unwillingness of majority Republican states to join the pact; after all it has been Republican candidates that were ushered into office via the electoral college despite losing the popular vote.
Written By: Aiden Singh Published: July 26, 2020