Why there's an Electoral College

Just what is the Electoral College?

Under Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution, "electors" from each state—not ordinary citizens—are given the authority to pick the nation's leader. Each state gets a number of electors that's roughly—but not precisely—proportionate to the size of its population. Today, there are 538 electors. The number of electors in each state corresponds to its number of senators (two) plus the number of representatives it is allocated in Congress (which varies from Rhode Island's one to California's 53). No state, no matter how small, gets fewer than three electors.

How does the system work?

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In 48 states, it's a winner-take-all system: On Election Day, the candidate who gets the greatest number of popular votes in each state gets all of its electoral votes. (Nebraska and Maine have proportional systems, giving some electoral votes to each candidate.) Each presidential election, in effect, is the sum of 51 separate elections (including the District of Columbia). Whichever candidate gets at least 270 electoral votes—a simple majority—becomes president. On the Monday after the second Wednesday in December, the electors troupe to their respective state capitals and cast their votes in a race that's already been decided.

Why such a weird system?

It was the result of a compromise. When the founding fathers were drawing up the Constitution, in 1787, there were no political parties, and no real national media. The founders feared that uninformed citizens would simply vote for "favorite sons" from their own states. This prospect particularly alarmed small states and the South, who assumed that Virginia, New York, and the most populous states would elect their own leaders as chief executive every four years. To dilute the big states' power, James Madison and several other framers devised the elector system. They assumed that the electors would be selected from the ranks of the educated and politically involved, so their choices would presumably be more high-minded and less provincial. To ensure this, the electors were required to submit the name of at least one out-of-state resident in their choices for president and vice president.

Has the system worked?

If you live in Wyoming, South Dakota, or Rhode Island, you'd probably say it's worked splendidly. Since every state is guaranteed three electors, a sparsely populated state such as Wyoming—with just 500,000 residents—has one elector for every 165,000 people. California—with more than 33 million residents—has one elector for every 600,000 people. In other words, a vote cast in Wyoming has about four times the weight in the Electoral College as a vote cast in California. For two centuries, critics have complained that the elector system is a blot on the one-man, one-vote principle that is the foundation of democracy.

But wasn't that its intent?

It certainly was. But much has changed since 1787. In today's highly polarized America, the Electoral College does not ensure that presidential candidates pay attention to all states. In fact, it ensures the opposite. The winner-take-all system allows the candidates to ignore states with strong Democratic or Republican majorities, and spend all their time and money on a small number of "swing" states.

Is that the only objection?

Hardly. As Al Gore can attest, the peculiar mathematics of the Electoral College make it possible to win the popular vote but lose the election. It's now happened four times in our history. The victims were John Quincy Adams, in 1824; Samuel J. Tilden, in 1876; Grover Cleveland, in 1888; and Gore, in 2000. There have also been plenty of close calls. In 1916, for example, a shift of only 2,000 votes in California would have given Charles Evans Hughes the presidency, even though Woodrow Wilson had half a million more popular votes. Each of these disputed elections left half the country feeling robbed, generating deep bitterness that lasted for years.

So why don't we junk the college?

Too many people like the system the way it is, flaws and all. Dozens of smaller states appreciate how the electoral system amplifies their power. So do minorities who constitute significant voting blocs, such as Cubans in Florida, blacks in New York, and Asians in California. In the winner-take-all system, their votes can put one candidate over the top in a given state, making their views important. "Abolish the Electoral College," said Urban League president Vernon Jordan, "and the importance of being black melts away. Blacks, instead of being crucial to victory in major states, simply become 10 percent of the total electorate."

So we're stuck with it?

It looks that way. A majority of Americans have consistently supported direct presidential elections, to no avail. Over the years, more than 700 bills have been introduced in Congress to alter or abolish the Electoral College. None of them have gone very far. Ultimately, three-quarters of the states would have to agree to amending the Constitution, and that's not likely to happen. "Wyoming is not going to get rid of a system that increases the voice of Wyoming by 300 percent," said Mark A. Siegel, a senior fellow at American University's Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies. "Nor is Delaware. Nor is small state after small state. Nor should they."

The stolen election

If you think the presidential election of 2000 was ugly, you should have been around for the election of 1876. Waged against the backdrop of Reconstruction, the race pitted Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, a reform-minded governor of New York, against Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, a three-term governor of Ohio. Amid vote-buying, intimidation, and political skulduggery of the most blatant sort, three states—Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina—submitted two sets of electoral votes, one for Hayes and one for Tilden. A constitutional crisis ensued, and Congress appointed a special election commission to sort out the disputed votes. In a backroom deal, the Republican-controlled commission asked Southern Democrats to award all 19 disputed votes to Hayes; in return, President Hayes would withdraw all federal troops from the South. The bribe was accepted. Hayes wound up with 185 electoral votes to Tilden's 184. For the next four years, bitter Democrats called the new president "Rutherfraud" and Tilden "President Tilden." Tilden called the debacle "the greatest political crime of our history."