How Does the Electoral College Work?

The Electoral College is the system we use in the United States to select the president. Each state gets as many electors as its total number of representatives and senators in Congress. Every four years in December, sworn electors meet on the same day to cast their votes for the president. Though the Constitution says the electors can choose how they want to award their votes, in all but two states (Nebraska and Maine) the winner of the popular vote in that state receives all of its electoral votes. The presidential candidate who wins the vote of at least 270 electors—more than half of the total of 538—wins the election.

If you were a political theorist or a political philosopher designing a system, this is not the system you would design. It came about as a good old-fashioned political compromise by the delegates who gathered at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. It was a compromise between those who wanted a popular vote—no country at that point had ever elected a chief executive, monarch, or prime minister by direct vote of the population—and those who wanted Congress to select the president.

The Southern states and the small states like Delaware were concerned that a popular vote system would give too much power to the Northern states like Pennsylvania and Virginia, which had many more qualified voters. The South was worried about any system based on population, because 40 percent of their population were slaves, and they had no intention of giving them the right to vote. The Three-Fifths Compromise, however, allowed for that portion of the enslaved population to be counted when representatives, and thus electoral votes, were allocated. The Electoral College system also favored very small states since a minimum of three electors per state was established.

Fast forward to the modern era, and for a long time it didn’t matter that the system was a jerry-rigged compromise because for most elections until recent history, if you won the popular vote by enough, you were guaranteed to win the presidency. Even now, people only tend to complain about the Electoral College every four years and only when the votes are very close. What’s concerning is that the Electoral College system has an asymmetric effect. There’s a partisan bias to it.

It turns out the Electoral College is currently biased toward the Republicans. There are states that are overwhelmingly Democratic, like California, and then there are Republican states, like Texas and Florida. The Republicans win those states, but they win them by just a few percentage points, so they’re not “wasting” too many votes, whereas Biden won California by almost 30 percentage points in 2020, and Harris is on track to do the same—but all those extra individual votes don’t get them more electoral votes. What the Democratic Party would love to do is be able to transfer some of those votes to somewhere like Georgia or North Carolina or Pennsylvania, because even with those millions of extra Democratic votes in California, you can’t win the state more than once.

The Republicans do have some states where they win overwhelmingly. They’re mostly the rural states—places like South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming—but they’re small, so they don’t control very many electoral votes, whereas the Democrats win New York, Illinois, and California overwhelmingly, and that’s just disastrous for their party’s candidate. Essentially, Harris has to win the popular vote by 2 percent or 3 percent because so many Democratic votes are being soaked up by states like California.

There are two notions of fairness around the Electoral College. One has to do with partisan symmetry. Does the Electoral College treat candidates of the two major parties differently? The answer is yes, it currently favors Republicans. So that’s one concern. The other concern is how it affects the ability of someone living in a state like California to influence the vote versus someone who lives in Delaware.

People have talked about getting rid of the Electoral College and replacing it with a national popular vote, but to do that would require a Constitutional amendment, and the Constitution is designed to make it very, very difficult to amend. You would have to have supermajorities in both the House and the Senate, and a supermajority of states to get any amendment to pass. And since Republicans think the Electoral College favors them these days, that is probably a nonstarter.

Another strategy the Democratic states have attempted to get around the unfairness of the Electoral College is what’s called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC), which basically says that electors have to vote for whoever wins the overall popular vote nationally, versus who won the popular vote in their own state. But this won’t happen until a majority of the states have agreed to it, and that is not likely to happen because Republicans don’t like it. No Republican candidate in the last two decades has won the presidency by winning the popular vote. They lose the popular vote but win the Electoral College. So, you’re in this sort of catch-22 situation where Democrats would like to reform the Electoral College, but Republicans not so much.