How does the Electoral College work?

Article 2, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution ordains the existence of a body of electors that votes every four years to decide who will be the next president of the United States. That body of electors, now known as the Electoral College, has since become a misunderstood staple of American politics. How does the Electoral College work, and should Americans change how their presidential votes are counted?

What is the Electoral College? The college is not a place, but rather a group of appointed electors that chooses who will be the president of the United States. The Founding Fathers established the Electoral College as a compromise between two proposals—one being to hold a popular vote to elect the president and the second being to make the members of Congress appoint the president.

Who are the electors and how are they chosen? The Republican and Democratic parties in each state decide who their electors will be. Electors must satisfy certain eligibility requirements that are either enumerated by their state’s government or determined by their state’s parties. Each state gets as many electors as it does seats in both chambers of Congress combined.

So how does this work in the local ballot box? Voters, when they choose a presidential candidate on their ballots, are picking which party-approved electors will represent their state. Those electors are expected to vote for that candidate when the Electoral College convenes at a later date.

Do electors have to vote for their assigned candidate? Some states have laws requiring electors to vote for their party’s candidate while other states do not. In states without laws requiring electors to vote for their party’s candidate, the political parties can sometimes still extract pledges from the electors that they will obey the will of the voters and party. Less than 1 percent of all electors in U.S. history have voted for a candidate their party didn’t support, according to the National Archives.

Can competing presidential candidates win electors in the same state? If a presidential candidate wins the popular vote in a state, he or she gets all of that state’s electors’ votes—unless the state is Maine or Nebraska. In those two states, candidates receive only the electoral votes from the congressional districts that they won. There is no winner-take-all. But the candidate who wins the most districts in either state does get two bonus electoral votes.

When do the electors cast their own ballots? While many news outlets report projected results on election night, the state electors don’t convene to cast their votes for president until mid-December. Afterward, they send their votes to the president of the Senate—that is, the U.S. vice president. The vice president, in the presence of the Senate, then counts up and certifies the electors’ votes.

Should the United States change this election process? Many Americans think so. The Pew Research Center reported last year that 65 percent of U.S. adults believe the Electoral College should be abolished. Americans have tried more than 700 times in the last 200 years to either abolish or change the Electoral College system, according to the National Archives.

But are there any benefits to the current system?The Electoral College’s structure forces presidential candidates to focus on a broader swath of potential voters. As the Heritage Foundation explains, candidates have to win over voters from a mix of rural and urban areas of the country in order to take the White House. If the Electoral College didn’t exist, politicians would likely focus exclusively on urban areas instead of addressing the interests and needs of less populated communities. Additionally, Heritage explains, the Electoral College naturally isolates any voter fraud problems: Stolen votes in a particular district can only affect the outcome of a single state.