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Tiara 4200 Open

• By Jay Coyle
• Updated: October 4, 2007

Tiara’s new 4200 Open has a familiar feel. While her styling is in step with the builder’s latest offerings, she was inspired by and replaces its popular 4100 Open. I fished aboard the 4100 shortly after her introduction in 1996, and while I do not recall my exact words at the time, I was impressed. In fact, I have long felt the 4100 was one of the builder’s best hulls. A hard act to follow, but Tiara has skillfully moved forward.

“Owners have been telling us that they wanted a more stylish look”, said John Garland, Tiara’s vice president of design. Tiara has loosened its tie in recent years, and the 4200 has the satisfying, soft look that is popular these days. She incorporates Tiara’s new fiberglass windshield design, a feature that is attractive and practical, as aluminum-framed windscreens tend to shed paint. Her corners are rounded a bit, and her sheer has a gentle S-curve that terminates in a shapely transom.

Tiara’s experience with the 4100 demonstrated that while most owners cruise, roughly 20 percent fish casually and 10 percent take angling quite seriously. For this reason, the 4200 is offered with options designed to fit a particular owner’s mission.

For example, aft-facing cockpit seating can be substituted for a bait-prep center with a sink, freezer and tackle drawers. A fold-down transom seat tucks out of the way, and there is a transom door and cockpit shower. A cooler box can be configured as a live well, and there is an under-sole fishbox/stowage locker that can be plumbed with a macerator (it discharges overboard).

The 4200’s bridge can be capped with a factory fiberglass hardtop or a custom tower. Our test boat had the molded fiberglass hardtop, an impressive affair with painted aluminum supports and a fitted isinglass enclosure. Hatches provide natural ventilation, and an air-conditioning discharge is placed to please the captain. An L-shape settee serves as a stowage locker for life jackets, and the wet bar can be fitted with a refrigerator or ice maker.

Her main cabin layout is similar to the 4100’s, however, the L-shape settee is larger, more plush and fitted with a section that has a recliner. A 22-inch flat-screen TV is positioned for easy viewing, and a Bose sound system is positioned for easy listening. The settee back tips up to form a single Pullman-style berth.

The U-shape galley is finished with Corian countertops and has a two-burner cooktop, a microwave/convection oven and an under-counter Sub-Zero refrigerator/freezer.

The satin-finished teak joinery and teak-and-holly sole are Tiara trademarks that I find a pleasing alternative to more radical high-gloss interiors, which seem the rage.

A stateroom with a queen island berth is forward and has a private head with a molded fiberglass shower. The stateroom door is not fully framed and has a gap at the top. I do not favor this Tiara standard, as it compromises privacy.

Tiara has always been good at utilizing every inch of a design. This is because, as Garland said, “Over the years, we have discovered that our customers are cruising for longer periods of time. What might have easily been written off as lost space aboard the 4200 is put to use. This includes stowage in the settee, beneath the galley sole and beneath the berth. A portion of the electrical panel is stashed out of the way under the steps in the cabin entryway. While this is a clever space-saving idea, it makes the panel a bit hard to see.

The view from the helm is excellent thanks in part to the Stidd helm seat, which is adjustable with the push of a button (up/down, fore/aft). A molded-in tiered footrest allows for comfort, regardless of the chair’s position. The console is designed to accommodate the engine instrumentation and a fair share of electronics-at least two large displays. The console’s tilt-back design is a Tiara innovation that simplifies access to the backside of the instruments. The destroyer-style (vertical) wheel is a standard feature that serious fishermen will simply have to accept.

Marine diesels and owner expectations have changed quite a bit since I tested the Detroit Diesel 6V92TA-powered 4100. She had a cruising speed of about 28 knots. A pair of 435 hp 3208TA Caterpillars were also offered and yielded a 25-knot cruise.

“Everybody wants to go fast today”, Garland said. “There’s no magic. You just add horsepower.”

Tiara chose 700 hp Caterpillar C12s for hull number one. I recorded a cruising speed of 30.4 knots at 2100 rpm, and noted a combined fuel burn of 56 gallons per hour on the Caterpillar electronics. The C12s have what it takes to get the 4200 up and running in a hurry. From a dead stop, it took less than 30 seconds to reach a maximum speed of 33.4 knots, without any significant smoke.

The 4200’s hull form has fine convex sections forward that moderate to 17.5 degrees of deadrise at the transom. She has a shallow keel to enhance directional stability, and shallow propeller pockets to reduce shaft angle and draft. Her ride at cruising speed was comfortable and dry in the 2- to 4-foot seas. The Teleflex steering was responsive, and the Bennett trim tabs were only necessary for minor adjustments to athwartships trim.

Big horsepower in small boats often results in tight enginerooms, which is the case with the 4200. The engineroom is accessible from the cockpit, as well as via a hatch adjacent to the helm. On hull number one (our test boat), access about the space was limited to the centerline, which will make it difficult to service components outboard of the engines.

Garland indicated that Tiara’s team was looking into the problem and said access would be much better with the 660 hp Cummins QSM11 package. Garland also said Tiara’s sea trials with the QSM11s yielded a maximum speed of 35.1 knots, which is slightly more than our test 4200 achieved.

While the C12s are a solid choice, considering Garland’s observations and my own, I would probably opt for the 660 hp QSM11s.

Tiara has been noted in the past for the effort it puts into tooling, and the 4200’s gelcoat finish follows in form. It is virtually flawless. The hull laminate is a solid blend of stitched and woven reinforcements and polyester resin. A vinylester skin coat is used below the waterline to reduce the chance of blistering.

The bottom laminate is supported by a network of fiberglass stingers built over foam and wood forms, which are supported by marine plywood bulkheads and web frames. Balsa coring is used to stiffen the topsides and exterior decks.

I have written before that Tiara’s designs are a product of evolution, not revolution. This is a compliment, for as some builders chase one trend or another, Tiara’s brand and pedigree have followed a steady course. This is why Tiara owners keep coming back, and why other yachtsmen gravitate to the marque.

It is also why the 4200 is worthy of consideration.

Contact: Tiara Yachts, (616) 392-7163; www.tiarayachts.com .

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2006 Tiara Yachts 4200 Open

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advanced co brokerage Florida power is pleased to assist you in the purchase of this vessel. This boat is centrally listed by South Jersey Yacht Sales - Pt. Pleasant.

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• Queen berth
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• Overboard, recirculating, electric head with holding tank
• Ample storage
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• Two-burner, electric stove
• Pressure fresh water system
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• Bow pulpit with rails
• Anchor with 200' lines
• Stidd Electric Helm seat
• 6-person Raft on hardtop
• Single, fixed, electric search light with remote control
• Freshwater, saltwater, pressure Deck washdown system
• Live fish well
• (4) Rod holders
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• 2-hole Rocket launcher / Bait tray
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electoral college opinion essay

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A Growing Number Of Critics Raise Alarms About The Electoral College

Mara Liasson

Then-Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi preside over a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6 to certify the 2020 Electoral College results after a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol earlier that day. Erin Schaff/Pool/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Then-Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi preside over a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6 to certify the 2020 Electoral College results after a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol earlier that day.

It's hard to make an intellectual argument in favor of the Electoral College. Most people feel that the person who gets the most votes should become president.

After all, that's how we run every other election in this country, says Jesse Wegman, the author of Let the People Pick the President .

"If anything, representative democracy in the 21st century is about political equality. It's about one person, one vote — everybody's vote counting equally," he said. "You're not going to convince a majority of Americans that that's not how you should do it."

Another way the Electoral College is unfair, says Harvard University political scientist Gautam Mukunda, is that each state gets electors based on its representation in the House and Senate, which means small states get extra votes.

"The fact that in presidential elections people in Wyoming have [nearly four] times the power of people in California is antithetical at the most basic level to what we say we stand for as a democracy," he said.

But Brad Smith, who used to be on the Federal Election Commission, disagrees.

Sure, the election may be decided by just a handful of states — swing states that can shift red or blue. But Smith, a Republican, says the battleground is diverse.

"Those states include some of the states with the heaviest minority populations in the United States, some of the states with the fewest minority populations in the United States," he said. "They include states from every region of the country, and that forces candidates to try to go out and have a platform that will appeal to the huge, diverse sections of America — or at least not grossly turn them off."

And Smith points out that for most of American history, the Electoral College amplified the popular vote, rather than contradicting it.

"Our calculus might change if pretty much every single election, you know, the person who won the most popular votes wasn't winning," he said.

The problem is that twice since 2000, the person with the most votes didn't win. Both times — in 2000 and 2016 — it was the Republican candidate who got fewer votes but ended up in the White House.

And even when that doesn't happen, Wegman sees another problem with the Electoral College system.

"In 2020, despite the 7 million-vote victory that Joe Biden won in the popular vote, people overlook the fact that 45,000 votes switch in the three key battleground states, and you're looking at a second term of Donald Trump," he said. "I mean, the fact that you could have the entire outcome of the election ride on 45,000 votes in three random states is, you know, just a huge, glaring vulnerability for any republic."

"Undue" weight of key states

That vulnerability was on full display on Jan. 6, when Trump and the violent insurrectionists pressed Congress to overturn Biden's Electoral College win. Without the Electoral College, it would have been much harder for them to have asked Congress to overturn the will of 7 million voters. Instead, Trump asked Congress to throw out the electoral votes from just a handful of battleground states.

That means the Electoral College puts a magnifying glass on just a few states that could have tremendous control over presidential elections.

"The Electoral College does mean a small number of states have undue weight in the outcome of our elections and that smaller manipulations can have broad national consequences," said Wendy Weiser, vice president for democracy at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice, which advocates for expanded ballot access.

What she means by manipulations are the efforts by Republicans to change election laws in their favor.

"Vote suppression is one way of doing that — subtracting voters from the electorate who you think won't vote for your preferred candidates," she said. "But this new trend of actually taking over the machinery of elections and giving themselves the power to run things or make decisions or count the votes is another way of doing this."

Republican state lawmakers in places like Georgia and Texas have advanced bills that would give new powers to legislatures to fire election officials and overturn elections.

Democrats don't have the votes in the states or in Congress to stop these laws, so Democrats are trying to build public pressure against them. Republicans say their goal is to fight future election fraud. The 2020 election was declared the most secure ever, but Trump continues to push the lie that the election was stolen from him.

Democrats Increasingly Say American Democracy Is Sliding Toward Minority Rule

Why Possibly Changing The Filibuster Brings Threats Of Political 'Nuclear' War

On the other hand, Republicans don't have to convince the public. They have the votes to pass ballot restrictions, and in some cases they have never held public hearings.

"This is the essence of the minority-rule position, right?" Harvard's Mukunda said. "You don't have to convince the public that the system is fair. You just have to convince them that it's not so unfair they should overthrow the system."

And for Republicans, the system, with all its minoritarian features — the Electoral College, the U.S. Senate , the filibuster , partisan gerrymandering — is, at least for now, working in their favor. But maybe it's not good for democracy when one party doesn't have to try to win the most votes in a presidential election.

A warning from Republicans

Smith says this is something fellow Republicans should consider.

"They keep losing the aggregated popular vote," he said. "Republicans aren't getting enough votes, and that's why they're losing most presidential elections. And, you know, they need to think about, how do we appeal to more people?"

In the runup to the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol, 12 House Republicans issued an extraordinary statement that warned about the demise of the Electoral College.

"Republican presidential candidates have won the national popular vote only once in the last 32 years," it stated. The signers then implored their colleagues not to vote to reject the electors from battleground states, as Trump was asking them to do.

"Even looking at it from a narrow partisan lens, this process or that objection was potentially imperiling the Electoral College," said Michigan Rep. Peter Meijer, one of the Republicans who signed the letter.

And that would be a bad thing for Republicans, because they depend on the Electoral College. As the statement said: "We will be delegitimizing the very system that led Donald Trump to victory in 2016, and that could provide the only path to victory in 2024."

Correction June 10, 2021

An earlier version of this story included a misspoken quote that said people in Wyoming have 44 times the power of people in California in presidential elections. In fact, people in Wyoming have nearly four times the power of people in California.

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Majority of Americans continue to favor moving away from Electoral College

In 2000 and 2016, the winners of the popular vote lost their bids for U.S. president after receiving fewer Electoral College votes than their opponents. To continue tracking how the public views the U.S. system for presidential elections, we surveyed 8,480 U.S. adults from July 10 to 16, 2023.

Everyone who took part in the current survey is a member of Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

Here are the questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and its methodology .

The Electoral College has played an outsize role in some recent U.S. elections. And a majority of Americans would welcome a change to the way presidents are elected, according to a new Pew Research Center survey .

Nearly two-thirds of U.S. adults (65%) say the way the president is elected should be changed so that the winner of the popular vote nationwide wins the presidency. A third favor keeping the current Electoral College system.

Public opinion on this question is essentially unchanged from last year, though Americans’ support for using the popular vote to decide the presidency remains higher than it was a few years ago.

Explore Americans’ views of the political system

This article draws from our major report on Americans’ attitudes about the political system and political representation, conducted July 10-16, 2023. For more, explore:

• The report chapter on Americans’ views of proposed changes to the political system
• The full report

The current electoral system in the United States allows for the possibility that the winner of the popular vote may not secure enough Electoral College votes to win the presidency. This occurred in both the 2000 and 2016 elections, which were won by George W. Bush and Donald Trump, respectively.

Partisan views over time

Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are far more likely than Republicans and Republican leaners to support moving to a popular vote system for presidential elections (82% vs. 47%).

The share of Democrats saying this is nearly identical to last year but higher than in January 2021, a few weeks before President Joe Biden was sworn into office after winning both the Electoral College and the popular vote.

Republicans are fairly divided on this question: 52% support keeping the current Electoral College system, and 47% support moving to a popular vote system. GOP support for moving to a popular vote is the highest it’s been in recent years – up from 37% in 2021 and just 27% in the days following the 2016 election.

Party and ideology

Nearly nine-in-ten liberal Democrats (88%) and about three-quarters of conservative and moderate Democrats (77%) say they would prefer presidents to be elected based on the popular vote.

Ideological differences are wider among Republicans. A clear majority – 63% – of conservative Republicans prefer keeping the current system, while 36% would change it.

The balance of opinion reverses among moderate and liberal Republicans (who make up a much smaller share of the Republican coalition). A majority of moderate and liberal Republicans (63%) say they would back the country moving to a popular vote for president.

Younger adults are somewhat more supportive of changing the system than older adults. About seven-in-ten Americans under 50 (69%) support this. That share drops to about six-in-ten (58%) among those 65 and older.

Political engagement

Political engagement – being interested in and paying attention to politics – is associated with views about the Electoral College, particularly among Republicans.

Highly politically engaged Republicans overwhelmingly favor keeping the Electoral College: 72% say this, while 27% support moving to a popular vote system.

Republicans with a moderate level of engagement are more divided, with 51% wanting to keep the system as is and 48% wanting to change it. And a clear majority of Republicans with lower levels of political engagement (70%) back moving to a popular vote.

Differences by engagement are much less pronounced among Democrats. About eight-in-ten Democrats with low (78%) and medium (82%) levels of engagement favor changing the system, as do 86% of highly engaged Democrats.

Note: This is an update of posts previously published on Jan. 27, 2021 (written by Bradley Jones, a former senior researcher), and Aug. 5, 2022 (written by Jocelyn Kiley and Rebecca Salzer, a former intern). Here are the questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and its methodology .

In January 2020, Pew Research Center ran a survey experiment that asked this question in two slightly different ways. One used the language that we and other organizations had used in prior years, with the reform option asking about “amending the Constitution so the candidate who receives the most votes nationwide wins the election.” The other version asked about “changing the system so the candidate who receives the most votes nationwide wins the election.” The January 2020 survey revealed no substantive differences between asking about “amending the Constitution” and “changing the system.”

We conducted this experiment in large part because reforming the way presidents are selected does not technically require amending the Constitution. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact , for example, could theoretically accomplish it without a constitutional amendment. Since there was no substantive difference in the survey results between the two question wordings, we have adopted the revised wording.

• Election System & Voting Process
• Politics & Policy
• U.S. Elections & Voters

Jocelyn Kiley is a senior associate director of research at Pew Research Center .

Many Americans are confident the 2024 election will be conducted fairly, but wide partisan differences remain

Key facts about u.s. poll workers, republicans, democrats continue to differ sharply on voting access, what can improve democracy, 2024 presidential primary season was one of the shortest in the modern political era, most popular.

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It’s time to abolish the Electoral College

• Download the full report

Darrell M. West Darrell M. West Senior Fellow - Center for Technology Innovation , Douglas Dillon Chair in Governmental Studies

October 15, 2019

• 14 min read

For years when I taught campaigns and elections at Brown University, I defended the Electoral College as an important part of American democracy. I said the founders created the institution to make sure that large states did not dominate small ones in presidential elections, that power between Congress and state legislatures was balanced, and that there would be checks and balances in the constitutional system.

In recent years, though, I have changed my view and concluded it is time to get rid of the Electoral College. In this paper, I explain the history of the Electoral College, why it no longer is a constructive force in American politics, and why it is time to move to the direct popular election of presidents. Several developments have led me to alter my opinion on this institution: income inequality, geographic disparities, and how discrepancies between the popular vote and Electoral College are likely to become more commonplace given economic and geographic inequities. The remainder of this essay outlines why it is crucial to abolish the Electoral College.

The original rationale for the Electoral College

The framers of the Constitution set up the Electoral College for a number of different reasons. According to Alexander Hamilton in Federalist Paper Number 68, the body was a compromise at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia between large and small states. Many of the latter worried that states such as Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia would dominate the presidency so they devised an institution where each state had Electoral College votes in proportion to the number of its senators and House members. The former advantaged small states since each state had two senators regardless of its size, while the latter aided large states because the number of House members was based on the state’s population.

In addition, there was considerable discussion regarding whether Congress or state legislatures should choose the chief executive. Those wanting a stronger national government tended to favor Congress, while states’ rights adherents preferred state legislatures. In the end, there was a compromise establishing an independent group chosen by the states with the power to choose the president.

But delegates also had an anti-majoritarian concern in mind. At a time when many people were not well-educated, they wanted a body of wise men (women lacked the franchise) who would deliberate over leading contenders and choose the best man for the presidency. They explicitly rejected a popular vote for president because they did not trust voters to make a wise choice.

How it has functioned in practice

In most elections, the Electoral College has operated smoothly. State voters have cast their ballots and the presidential candidate with the most votes in a particular state has received all the Electoral College votes of that state, except for Maine and Nebraska which allocate votes at the congressional district level within their states.

But there have been several contested elections. The 1800 election deadlocked because presidential candidate Thomas Jefferson received the same number of Electoral College votes as his vice presidential candidate Aaron Burr. At that time, the ballot did not distinguish between Electoral College votes for president and vice president. On the 36th ballot, the House chose Jefferson as the new president. Congress later amended the Constitution to prevent that ballot confusion from happening again.

Just over two decades later, Congress had an opportunity to test the newly established 12th Amendment . All four 1824 presidential aspirants belonged to the same party, the Democratic-Republicans, and although each had local and regional popularity, none of them attained the majority of their party’s Electoral College votes. Andrew Jackson came the closest, with 99 Electoral College votes, followed by John Quincy Adams with 84 votes, William Crawford with 41, and Henry Clay with 37.

Because no candidate received the necessary 131 votes to attain the Electoral College majority, the election was thrown into the House of Representatives. As dictated by the 12th Amendment , each state delegation cast one vote among the top three candidates. Since Clay no longer was in the running, he made a deal with Adams to become his secretary of state in return for encouraging congressional support for Adams’ candidacy. Even though Jackson had received the largest number of popular votes, he lost the presidency through what he called a “corrupt bargain” between Clay and Adams.

America was still recovering from the Civil War when Republican Rutherford Hayes ran against Democrat Samuel Tilden in the 1876 presidential election. The race was so close that the electoral votes of just four states would determine the presidency. On Election Day, Tilden picked up the popular vote plurality and 184 electoral votes, but fell one vote short of an Electoral College majority. However, Hayes claimed that his party would have won Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina if not for voter intimidation against African American voters; and in Oregon, one of Hayes’ three electoral votes was in dispute.

Instead of allowing the House to decide the presidential winner, as prescribed by the 12th Amendment, Congress passed a new law to create a bipartisan Electoral Commission . Through this commission, five members each from the House, Senate, and Supreme Court would assign the 20 contested electoral votes from Louisiana, Florida, South Carolina, and Oregon to either Hayes or Tilden. Hayes became president when this Electoral Commission ultimately gave the votes of the four contested states to him. The decision would have far-reaching consequences because in return for securing the votes of the Southern states, Hayes agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South, thereby paving the way for vigilante violence against African Americans and the denial of their civil rights.

Allegations of election unfairness also clouded the 2000 race. The contest between Republican George Bush and Democrat Al Gore was extremely close, ultimately resting on the fate of Florida’s 25 electoral votes. Ballot controversies in Palm Beach County complicated vote tabulation. It used the “butterfly ballot” design , which some decried as visually confusing. Additionally, other Florida counties that required voters to punch perforated paper ballots had difficulty discerning the voters’ choices if they did not fully detach the appropriate section of the perforated paper.

Accordingly, on December 8, 2000, the Florida Supreme Court ordered manual recounts in counties that reported statistically significant numbers of undervotes. The Bush campaign immediately filed suit, and in response, the U.S. Supreme Court paused manual recounts to hear oral arguments from candidates. On December 10, in a landmark 7-2 decision, the Supreme Court struck down the Florida Supreme Court’s recount decision, ruling that a manual recount would violate the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. Bush won Florida’s Electoral College votes and thus the presidency even though Gore had won the popular vote by almost half a million votes.

The latest controversy arose when Donald Trump lost the popular vote by almost three million ballots yet won the Electoral College by 74 votes. That made him the fifth U.S. chief executive to become president without winning the popular vote. This discrepancy between the Electoral College and the popular vote created considerable contentiousness about the electoral system. It set the Trump presidency off on a rough start and generated a critical tone regarding his administration.

The faithless elector problem

In addition to the problems noted above, the Electoral College suffers from another difficulty known as the “faithless elector” issue in which that body’s electors cast their ballot in opposition to the dictates of their state’s popular vote. Samuel Miles, a Federalist from Pennsylvania, was the first of this genre as for unknown reasons, he cast his vote in 1796 for the Democratic-Republican candidate, Thomas Jefferson, even though his own Federalist party candidate John Adams had won Pennsylvania’s popular vote.

Miles turned out to be the first of many. Throughout American history, 157 electors have voted contrary to their state’s chosen winner. Some of these individuals dissented for idiosyncratic reasons, but others did so because they preferred the losing party’s candidate. The precedent set by these people creates uncertainty about how future Electoral College votes could proceed.

This possibility became even more likely after a recent court decision. In the 2016 election, seven electors defected from the dictates of their state’s popular vote. This was the highest number in any modern election. A Colorado lawsuit challenged the legality of state requirements that electors follow the vote of their states, something which is on the books in 29 states plus the District of Columbia. In the Baca v. Hickenlooper case, a federal court ruled that states cannot penalize faithless electors, no matter the intent of the elector or the outcome of the state vote.

Bret Chiafalo and plaintiff Michael Baca were state electors who began the self-named “Hamilton Electors” movement in which they announced their desire to stop Trump from winning the presidency. Deriving their name from Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, they convinced a few members of the Electoral College to cast their votes for other Republican candidates, such as John Kasich or Mitt Romney. When Colorado decided to nullify Baca’s vote, he sued. A three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit ruled that Colorado’s decision to remove Baca’s vote was unconstitutional since the founders were explicit about the constitutional rights of electors to vote independently. Based on this legal ruling and in a highly polarized political environment where people have strong feelings about various candidates, it is possible that future faithless electors could tip the presidency one way or another, thereby nullifying the popular vote.

Why the Electoral College is poorly suited for an era of high income inequality and widespread geographic disparities

The problems outlined above illustrate the serious issues facing the Electoral College. Having a president who loses the popular vote undermines electoral legitimacy. Putting an election into the House of Representatives where each state delegation has one vote increases the odds of insider dealings and corrupt decisions. Allegations of balloting irregularities that require an Electoral Commission to decide the votes of contested states do not make the general public feel very confident about the integrity of the process. And faithless electors could render the popular vote moot in particular states.

Yet there is a far more fundamental threat facing the Electoral College. At a time of high income inequality and substantial geographical disparities across states, there is a risk that the Electoral College will systematically overrepresent the views of relatively small numbers of people due to the structure of the Electoral College. As currently constituted, each state has two Electoral College votes regardless of population size, plus additional votes to match its number of House members. That format overrepresents small- and medium-sized states at the expense of large states.

That formula is problematic at a time when a Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program study found that 15 percent of American counties generate 64 percent of America’s gross domestic product. Most of the country’s economic activity is on the East Coast, West Coast, and a few metropolitan areas in between. The prosperous parts of America include about 15 states having 30 senators while the less prosperous areas encapsulate 35 states having 70 senators.

Those numbers demonstrate the fundamental mismatch between economic vitality and political power. Through the Electoral College (and the U.S. Senate), the 35 states with smaller economic activity have disproportionate power to choose presidents and dictate public policy. This institutional relic from two centuries ago likely will fuel continued populism and regular discrepancies between the popular and Electoral College votes. Rather than being a historic aberration, presidents who lose the popular vote could become the norm and thereby usher in an anti-majoritarian era where small numbers of voters in a few states use their institutional clout in “left-behind” states to block legislation desired by large numbers of people.

Support for direct popular election

For years, a majority of Americans have opposed the Electoral College . For example, in 1967, 58 percent favored its abolition, while in 1981, 75 percent of Americans did so. More recent polling, however, has highlighted a dangerous development in public opinion. Americans by and large still want to do away with the Electoral College, but there now is a partisan divide in views, with Republicans favoring it while Democrats oppose it.

For instance, POLITICO and Morning Consult conducted a poll in March 2019 that found that 50 percent of respondents wanted a direct popular vote, 34 percent did not, and 16 percent did not demonstrate a preference. Two months later, NBC News and the Wall Street Journal reported polling that 53 percent of Americans wanted a direct popular vote, while 43 percent wanted to keep the status quo. These sentiments undoubtably have been reinforced by the fact that in two of the last five presidential elections, the candidate winning the popular vote lost the Electoral College.

Yet there are clear partisan divisions in these sentiments. In 2000, while the presidential election outcome was still being litigated, a Gallup survey reported that 73 percent of Democratic respondents supported a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College and move to direct popular voting, but only 46 percent of Republican respondents supported that view. This gap has since widened as after the 2016 election, 81 percent of Democrats and 19 percent of Republicans affirmatively answered the same question .

The March POLITICO and Morning Consult poll also found that 72 percent of Democratic respondents and 30 percent of Republican respondents endorsed a direct popular vote. Likewise, the NBC News and Wall Street Journal poll found that 78 percent of Hillary Clinton voters supported a national popular vote, while 74 percent of Trump voters preferred the Electoral College.

Ways to abolish the Electoral College

The U.S. Constitution created the Electoral College but did not spell out how the votes get awarded to presidential candidates. That vagueness has allowed some states such as Maine and Nebraska to reject “winner-take-all” at the state level and instead allocate votes at the congressional district level. However, the Constitution’s lack of specificity also presents the opportunity that states could allocate their Electoral College votes through some other means.

One such mechanism that a number of states already support is an interstate pact that honors the national popular vote. Since 2008, 15 states and the District of Columbia have passed laws to adopt the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC), which is an multi-state agreement to commit electors to vote for candidates who win the nationwide popular vote, even if that candidate loses the popular vote within their state. The NPVIC would become effective only if states ratify it to reach an electoral majority of 270 votes.

Right now, the NPVIC is well short of that goal and would require an additional 74 electoral votes to take effect. It also faces some particular challenges. First, it is unclear how voters would respond if their state electors collectively vote against the popular vote of their state. Second, there are no binding legal repercussions if a state elector decides to defect from the national popular vote. Third, given the Tenth Circuit decision in the Baca v. Hickenlooper case described above, the NPVIC is almost certain to face constitutional challenges should it ever gain enough electoral votes to go into effect.

A more permanent solution would be to amend the Constitution itself. That is a laborious process and a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College would require significant consensus—at least two-thirds affirmation from both the House and Senate, and approval from at least 38 out of 50 states. But Congress has nearly reached this threshold in the past. Congress nearly eradicated the Electoral College in 1934, falling just two Senate votes short of passage.

However, the conversation did not end after the unsuccessful vote, legislators have continued to debate ending or reforming the Electoral College since. In 1979, another Senate vote to establish a direct popular vote failed, this time by just three votes. Nonetheless, conversation continued: the 95th Congress proposed a total of 41 relevant amendments in 1977 and 1978, and the 116th Congress has already introduced three amendments to end the Electoral College. In total, over the last two centuries, there have been over 700 proposals to either eradicate or seriously modify the Electoral College. It is time to move ahead with abolishing the Electoral College before its clear failures undermine public confidence in American democracy, distort the popular will, and create a genuine constitutional crisis.

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Should We Abolish the Electoral College?

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Editor’s Note : In 2016, we asked two professors to debate whether the Electoral College should cease to be the mechanism used for selecting the U.S. president. Here are the yea and the nay.

By Jack Rakove, the William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies and a professor of political science.

In this extraordinarily strange election year, debating the Electoral College might seem an odd pastime when so many other issues concern us. But its logic, its distortion of the democratic process and its underlying flaws will still strongly influence the conduct of the election. So, let me make the case for its abolition and its replacement by a simple national popular vote, to be held in an entity we will call (what the heck) the United States of America.

There are three basic arguments in favor of the system the framers of the Constitution gave us, with little sense of how it would actually work. The first is easily dismissed. Presidential electors are not more qualified than other citizens to determine who should head the government. They are simply party loyalists who do not deliberate about anything more than where to eat lunch.

A second argument holds less populous states deserve the further electoral weight they gain through the “senatorial bump” giving each state two electors, because their minority status entitles them to additional political protection. But the real interests of small-state voters are never determined by the relative size of the population of their states. If, say, environmental sustainability or abortion or the Second Amendment is your dominant concern, it does not matter whether you live in Wyoming or California, Pennsylvania or Delaware. The size of a state does not affect our real political preferences, even though the Electoral College system imagines that it does.

Third, defenders of the Electoral College also claim that it supports the underlying value of federalism. Having the states play an autonomous role in presidential elections, it is said, reinforces the division of governing authority between the nation and the states. But explaining exactly how it does this remains a mystery. Having a state-based system for electing both houses of Congress should be adequate to that task. Presidential elections have little if anything to do with the subject, even when some candidates claim to be “running against Washington.”

What are the positive arguments in favor of replacing the existing electoral system with a national popular vote? Here, again, there are three main points to make.

Having the states play an autonomous role in presidential elections, it is said, reinforces the division of governing authority between the nation and the states. But explaining exactly how it does this remains a mystery.

First, and most obviously, such a system would conform to the dominant democratic value that has prevailed in American politics ever since the one-person, one-vote reapportionment rulings of the early 1960s. Our votes would count the same wherever they were cast. No other mode of presidential elections would be fully consistent with our underlying commitment to the equality of all citizens.

Second, a national popular vote would eliminate the “battleground state” phenomenon that has now become the key feature of post-convention campaigning, leaving most Americans alienated from the decisive phase of presidential elections. “Swing” or “battleground” states are mere accidents of geography. They do not matter because they have any special civic characteristics. They simply happen to be states that become competitive because of their demography, and which are readily identifiable as such because of the increasing sophistication of political polling. In a truly national election, parties and candidates would have the incentive to turn out their votes wherever they were, fostering a deeper sense of engagement across the whole population.

Third, a national election might provide a cure for the delegitimation of presidential authority that has afflicted the last three presidencies. It is no secret that the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama all suffered, from the outset, from efforts to imply that there was something improper and unworthy or even suspicious in their elections. That same view will doubtless color the 2016 election as well. This perception is reinforced by the red- and blue-state imagery that controls our view of the electoral process. Having an election in which victory went to a candidate carrying a single national constituency might not wholly cure this problem, but it might well work to mitigate it.

By Michael W. McConnell, the Richard and Frances Mallery Professor of Law, director of the Constitutional Law Center and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

The Electoral College is not going to be changed, and there are far more urgent and promising topics for reform of our presidential selection system.

It is true that the Electoral College no longer serves its original purposes, and that it creates a grave risk that a candidate not favored by a majority of the people will, from time to time, be elected president. There have been three: John Quincy Adams, Benjamin Harrison and George W. Bush. We survived. Not one was a first-rank president, but their selection did not seriously injure the democratic character of our system.

The founders opted for the Electoral College because the two leading alternatives, election by Congress and by popular vote, were thought to have serious defects. Moreover, the electoral college method preserved the two compromises over representation—the three-fifths clause and the big state-small state compromise—and guarded against a fracturing of votes for many candidates, which they thought might occur once George Washington was no longer available as a nationally respected consensus candidate. The three-fifths clause became irrelevant with the end of slavery (thankfully!), and the big state-small state divide no longer animates our politics, if it ever did. The two-party system solves the fractured vote problem more effectively than the Electoral College ever did, and the electors never exercised genuine independence. The Electoral College thus presents democratic risks without serving any of its original purposes.

That is not to say the Electoral College is without its advantages. It gives a slight edge to candidates with broad-based support in many states over those who rack up huge majorities in just a few large states. That probably promotes a more national and less regional vision. It channels presidential politics into a two-party system, which is superior to multiparty systems where fringe factions can exercise too much leverage. It probably reduces the cost of presidential campaigns by confining television advertising to the battleground states (and spares the rest of us the tedium of endless repetitive ads). And it confines vote-counting disputes to just one, or maybe a few, states. Imagine a Florida-style recount in every precinct in America.

Still, the advantages are uncertain and relatively minor. Almost no one would adopt an Electoral College today if we were starting from scratch. But reforming the Electoral College does not rank high among our national problems. Given that a change would require a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress and three-quarters of the state legislatures, it is not going to happen. We should be talking about other things.

The great problems with our presidential selection system today stem from the haphazard way we choose the two major party presidential candidates. This year is the poster child for the need for reform. The two parties have chosen the same year in which to nominate a person whom large numbers of Americans, probably a majority, regard as unfit (though not for the same reason). Generally, we count on the Republican and Democratic parties to nominate not the best people, but candidates who combine a degree of popular support with the experience and temperament to govern. Not this year.

Almost no one would adopt an Electoral College today if we were starting from scratch. But reforming the Electoral College does not rank high among our national problems.

We need to think hard, and quickly, about how to reform three aspects of the presidential nomination process: the debates, the primary elections and the conventions. The current system is weighted too heavily in favor of celebrity appeal, demagogic displays and appeals to narrow special interests. The party structures—which, for all their faults, have a vested interest in candidates from the moderate middle who are able to work with Congress and other officials to govern—have been sidelined.

For almost the first half century of the republic, presidential candidates were chosen by the caucuses of the two parties in the House and the Senate. That system worked well until the two-party system briefly died with the Federalist Party. It was replaced by party conventions, which eventually were replaced (almost) with strings of single or multiple state primaries and caucuses. It seems to me that the original system may have been superior to what we now have. The elected officials of both parties have incentives to choose candidates with an eye toward popular electability and governing skill. Interestingly, the congressional caucus system is very close to the system the British used to replace Prime Minister David Cameron. Most Americans would breathe a sigh of relief, I believe, if we had a system capable of choosing the U.S. equivalent of Theresa May instead of Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Now is the time for sober and spirited citizens from both parties to devise a new system for 2020.

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The Electoral College Explained

A national popular vote would help ensure that every vote counts equally, making American democracy more representative.

• Electoral College Reform

In the United States, the presidency is decided not by the national popular vote but by the Electoral College — an outdated and convoluted system that sometimes yields results contrary to the choice of the majority of American voters. On five occasions, including in two of the last six elections, candidates have won the Electoral College, and thus the presidency, despite losing the nationwide popular vote. 

The Electoral College has racist origins — when established, it applied the three-fifths clause, which gave a long-term electoral advantage to slave states in the South — and continues to dilute the political power of voters of color. It incentivizes presidential campaigns to focus on a relatively small number of “swing states.” Together, these dynamics have spurred debate about the system’s democratic legitimacy.

To make the United States a more representative democracy, reformers are pushing for the presidency to be decided instead by the national popular vote, which would help ensure that every voter counts equally.

What is the Electoral College and how does it work?

The Electoral College is a group of intermediaries designated by the Constitution to select the president and vice president of the United States. Each of the 50 states is allocated presidential electors  equal to the number of its representatives and senators . The ratification of the 23rd Amendment in 1961 allowed citizens in the District of Columbia to participate in presidential elections as well; they have consistently had three electors.

In total, the Electoral College comprises  538 members . A presidential candidate must win a majority of the electoral votes cast to win — at least 270 if all 538 electors vote.

The Constitution grants state legislatures the power to decide how to appoint their electors. Initially, a number of state legislatures directly  selected their electors , but during the 19th century they transitioned to the popular vote, which is now used by  all 50 states . In other words, each awards its electoral votes to the presidential candidate chosen by the state’s voters.

Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia use a winner-take-all system, awarding all of their electoral votes to the popular vote winner in the state. Maine and Nebraska award one electoral vote to the popular vote winner in each of their congressional districts and their remaining two electoral votes to the statewide winner. Under this system, those two states sometimes split their electoral votes among candidates.

In the months leading up to the general election, the political parties in each state typically nominate their own slates of would-be electors. The state’s popular vote determines which party’s slates will be made electors. Members of the Electoral College  meet and vote in their respective states  on the Monday after the second Wednesday in December after Election Day. Then, on January 6, a joint session of Congress meets at the Capitol to count the electoral votes and declare the outcome of the election, paving the way for the presidential inauguration on January 20.

How was the Electoral College established?

The Constitutional Convention in 1787 settled on the Electoral College as a compromise between delegates who thought Congress should select the president and others who favored a direct nationwide popular vote. Instead, state legislatures were entrusted with appointing electors.

Article II  of the Constitution, which established the executive branch of the federal government, outlined the framers’ plan for the electing the president and vice president. Under this plan, each elector cast two votes for president; the candidate who received the most votes became the president, with the second-place finisher becoming vice president — which led to administrations in which political opponents served in those roles. The process was overhauled in 1804 with the ratification of the  12th Amendment , which required electors to cast votes separately for president and vice president. 

How did slavery shape the Electoral College?

At the time of the Constitutional Convention, the northern states and southern states had  roughly equal populations . However, nonvoting enslaved people made up about one-third of the southern states’ population. As a result, delegates from the South objected to a direct popular vote in presidential elections, which would have given their states less electoral representation.

The debate contributed to the convention’s eventual decision to establish the Electoral College, which applied the  three-fifths compromise  that had already been devised for apportioning seats in the House of Representatives. Three out of five enslaved people were counted as part of a state’s total population, though they were nonetheless prohibited from voting.

Wilfred U. Codrington III, an assistant professor of law at Brooklyn Law School and a Brennan Center fellow,  writes  that the South’s electoral advantage contributed to an “almost uninterrupted trend” of presidential election wins by southern slaveholders and their northern sympathizers throughout the first half of the 19th century. After the Civil War, in 1876, a contested Electoral College outcome was settled by a compromise in which the House awarded Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency with the understanding that he would withdraw military forces from the Southern states. This led to the end of Reconstruction and paved the way for racial segregation under Jim Crow laws.

Today, Codrington argues, the Electoral College continues to dilute the political power of Black voters: “Because the concentration of black people is highest in the South, their preferred presidential candidate is virtually assured to lose their home states’ electoral votes. Despite black voting patterns to the contrary, five of the six states whose populations are 25 percent or more black have been reliably red in recent presidential elections. … Under the Electoral College, black votes are submerged.”

What are faithless electors?  

Ever since the 19th century reforms, states have expected their electors to honor the will of the voters. In other words, electors are now pledged to vote for the winner of the popular vote in their state. However, the Constitution does not require them to do so, which allows for scenarios in which “faithless electors” have voted against the popular vote winner in their states. As of 2016, there have been  90 faithless electoral votes  cast out of 23,507 in total across all presidential elections. The 2016 election saw a record-breaking  seven faithless electors , including three who voted for former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was not a presidential candidate at the time.  

Currently, 33 states and the District of Columbia  require their presidential electors  to vote for the candidate to whom they are pledged. Only 5 states, however, impose a penalty on faithless electors, and only 14 states provide for faithless electors to be removed or for their votes to be canceled. In July 2020, the Supreme Court  unanimously upheld  existing state laws that punish or remove faithless electors.

What happens if no candidate wins a majority of Electoral College votes?

If no ticket wins a majority of Electoral College votes, the presidential election is  sent to the House of Representatives  for a runoff. Unlike typical House practice, however, each state only gets one vote, decided by the party that controls the state’s House delegation. Meanwhile, the vice-presidential race is decided in the Senate, where each member has one vote. This scenario  has not transpired since 1836 , when the Senate was tasked with selecting the vice president after no candidate received a majority of electoral votes.

Are Electoral College votes distributed equally between states?

Each state is allocated a number of electoral votes based on the total size of its congressional delegation. This benefits smaller states, which have at least three electoral votes — including two electoral votes tied to their two Senate seats, which are guaranteed even if they have a small population and thus a small House delegation. Based on population trends, those disparities will likely increase as the most populous states are expected to account for an even greater share of the U.S. population in the decades ahead. 

What did the 2020 election reveal about the Electoral College?

In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential race, Donald Trump and his allies fueled an effort to overturn the results of the election, spreading repeated lies about widespread voter fraud. This included attempts by a number of state legislatures to nullify some of their states’ votes, which often targeted jurisdictions with large numbers of Black voters. Additionally, during the certification process for the election, some members of Congress also objected to the Electoral College results, attempting to throw out electors from certain states. While these efforts ultimately failed, they revealed yet another vulnerability of the election system that stems from the Electoral College.

The  Electoral Count Reform Act , enacted in 2023, addresses these problems. Among other things, it clarifies which state officials have the power to appoint electors, and it bars any changes to that process after Election Day, preventing state legislatures from setting aside results they do not like. The new law also raises the threshold for consideration of objections to electoral votes. It is now one-fifth of each chamber instead of one senator and one representative.  Click here for more on the changes made by the Electoral Count Reform Act.

What are ways to reform the Electoral College to make presidential elections more democratic?

Abolishing the Electoral College outright would require a constitutional amendment. As a workaround, scholars and activist groups have rallied behind the  National Popular Vote Interstate Compact  (NPV), an effort that started after the 2000 election. Under it, participating states would  commit to awarding their electoral votes  to the winner of the national popular vote.

In other words, the NPV would formally retain the Electoral College but render it moot, ensuring that the winner of the national popular vote also wins the presidency. If enacted, the NPV would incentivize presidential candidates to expand their campaign efforts nationwide, rather than focus only on a small number of swing states.

For the NPV to take effect, it must first be adopted by states that control at least 270 electoral votes. In 2007, Maryland became the first state to enact the compact. As of 2019, a total of 19 states and Washington, DC, which collectively account for 196 electoral votes, have joined.

The public has consistently supported a nationwide popular vote. A 2020 poll by Pew Research Center, for example, found that  58 percent of adults  prefer a system in which the presidential candidate who receives the most votes nationwide wins the presidency.

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In Defense of the Electoral College

Allen guelzo, winter 2018.

There is hardly anything in the Constitution harder to explain, or easier to misunderstand, than the Electoral College. And when a presidential election hands the palm to a candidate who comes in second in the popular vote but first in the Electoral College tally, something deep in our democratic viscera balks and asks why.

Some argue that the Electoral College should be dumped as a useless relic of 18th-century white-gentry privilege. A month after the 2016 election, and on the day the members of the Electoral College met to cast their official votes, the New York Times editorial board published a scathing attack of this sort, calling the Electoral College an "antiquated mechanism" that "overwhelming majorities" of Americans would prefer to eliminate in favor of a direct, national popular vote. Others claim it is not only antiquated, but toxic — Akhil Reed Amar wrote in Time magazine that the Electoral College was deliberately designed to advance the political power of slaveholders:

[I]n a direct election system, the North would [have outnumbered] the South, whose many slaves (more than half a million in all) of course could not vote. But the Electoral College...instead let each southern state count its slaves, albeit with a two-fifths discount, in computing its share of the overall count.

Still others argue that, while the Electoral College may not be any more antiquated than the rest of the Constitution, the mechanism is simply ridiculous. "The winner is picked not by the laws of elections but by the serendipity of the casino," complained E. J. Dionne, Jr., in the Washington Post . "If you're lucky to hit the right numbers, narrowly, in a few states, you can override your opponent's big margins in other states." Or, shifting the metaphor, the Electoral College is bad sportsmanship. "Imagine," Dionne demands, "basing the winner of a game not on the number of runs scored but the number of innings won, and with some innings counting more than others." Eric Maskin and Amartya Sen at the New York Review of Books joined the demand for these "majorities" to prevail over the Electoral College. "The system...fails to reflect voters' preferences adequately. It also aggravates political polarization, gives citizens too few political options, and makes candidates spend most of their campaign time seeking voters in swing states rather than addressing the country at large." 

Curiously, there have been only five occasions in which a closely divided popular vote for the presidency and the Electoral College vote have failed to point in the same direction. The first occurred in 1824, when Andrew Jackson won a plurality of the popular vote over John Quincy Adams, William Crawford, and Henry Clay, but failed to win a majority in the Electoral College. The election was then decided by the House of Representatives, which granted the victory to Adams. Samuel Tilden edged out Rutherford Hayes in the 1876 popular vote, only to see the laurel snatched away when a congressional election commission awarded Hayes enough contested electoral votes to give him a one-vote Electoral College victory. In 1888, the incumbent Grover Cleveland won the popular vote by less than one percentage point, but Benjamin Harrison won the presidency with 233 electoral votes to Cleveland's 168. In 2000, Al Gore edged out George W. Bush in the popular vote by about half a million votes, but (after a razor-thin victory in Florida, contested all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court) Bush won a narrow Electoral College majority. And in 2016, Donald Trump garnered 2.8 million fewer popular votes than Hillary Clinton, but won a decisive victory, 304 to 227, in the Electoral College.

So, having Electoral College decisions overshadow popular-vote victories is neither novel nor (as in the examples of 1876 and 2000) entirely the fault of the Electoral College. But 2016 set off a swell of complaints nonetheless. This is largely because it was the first time since 1888 that, in a two-major-candidate race, one candidate won the popular vote but lost the electoral tally. Hence the chorus of denunciation — the Electoral College is undemocratic; the Electoral College is unnecessary; the Electoral College was invented to protect slavery — and the demand to push the institution down the memory hole.

But these criticisms are misguided. The Electoral College was designed by the framers deliberately, like the rest of the Constitution, to counteract the worst human impulses and protect the nation from the dangers inherent in democracy. The Electoral College is neither antiquated nor toxic; it is an underappreciated institution that helps preserve our constitutional system, and it deserves a full-throated defense.

CONSTITUTIONAL ROOTS

The democratic energies behind these denunciations offer a hint of the key problem with them. This is, after all, a constitutional republic, and even the most casual reader of the Constitution cannot fail to notice that the Electoral College is the only method specified by that document for selecting the president of the United States. For all the reverence paid to the popular vote in presidential elections, the Constitution says not a word about holding a popular vote for presidents.

Here is the election mechanism as it appears in Article 2, Section 1 (in a slightly abbreviated form, as it is the single longest part of the Constitution devoted to a single action, accounting for nearly a tenth of the Constitution's original length):

The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years, and, together with the Vice President, chosen for the same Term, be elected, as follows: Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress....The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves. And they shall make a List of all the Persons voted for, and of the Number of Votes for each; which List they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the Seat of the Government of the United States....The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President, if such Number be a Majority of the whole Number of Electors appointed....

This method was slightly altered by the 12th Amendment in 1804, but only slightly, and we have elected presidents in the same way ever since. There is no mention whatsoever of a popular vote, at any level. Each state is directed to appoint "a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress." The states may make these appointments by whatever means they choose, with a few restrictions on who can be appointed.

While it is true that, since the 19th century, each state has decided to appoint its electors by a popular vote, this is a compliment to our democratic predilections and is not required by the Constitution. And it should be noted that popular votes for electors occur only within each state; the electors then go on to do the presidential balloting. Ridding ourselves of the Electoral College would not automatically install a national popular vote for the presidency; that would require a highly complicated constitutional amendment specifying comprehensive details for casting such a national vote, and might even trigger calls for a complete rewriting of the Constitution by convention. Simply doing away with the existing process without putting a new one in its place could create the biggest political crisis in American history since the Civil War.

But the Electoral College system is not only embedded in the structure of our constitutional governance; it is also emblematic of the fact that we are a federal republic . The states of the American Union existed before the Constitution and, in a practical sense, existed long before the Revolution. Nothing guaranteed that the states would all act together in 1776; nothing guaranteed that, after the Revolution, they might not go their separate and quarrelsome ways (much like the German states of the 18th century or the South American republics in the 19th century). What is more, the Constitution's predecessor, the Articles of Confederation, very nearly invited such division. The Articles were, in their own terms, only "a firm league of friendship with each other," in which "[e]ach state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right." The Confederation Congress had repeated difficulties assembling a quorum just to do business; even the treaty of peace with Great Britain that ended the Revolutionary War nearly expired because an insufficient number of delegates showed up for its ratification. The genius of the Constitutional Convention lay in its successfully drawing the American states toward a "more perfect union." But it was still a union of states; we probably wouldn't have formed a constitution or a country at all had we not embraced federalism.

Abolishing the Electoral College now might satisfy an irritated yearning for direct democracy, but it would also mean dismantling federalism. After that, there would be no sense in having a Senate (which, after all, represents the interests of the states), and eventually, no sense in even having states, except as administrative departments of the central government. We structure everything in our political system around the idea of a federation that divides power between states and the federal government — states had to ratify the Constitution through state conventions beginning in 1787; state legislatures are required for ratifying constitutional amendments; and even the Constitution itself can only be terminated by action of the states in a national convention. Federalism is in the bones of our nation, and abolishing the Electoral College would point toward doing away with the entire federal system.

None of this, moreover, is likely to produce a more democratic election system. There are plenty of democracies, like Great Britain, where no one ever votes directly for a head of state. And there are federal republics that have maniacally complicated processes for electing leaders.

The German federal republic, for instance, is composed (like ours) of states that existed as independent entities long before their unification as a German nation, and whose histories as such have created an electoral system that makes our "antiquated" Electoral College look like a model of efficiency. In the German system, voters in 299 electoral districts each cast two votes in elections for the Bundestag (Germany's parliament): the first for a directly elected member and the second for one of 34 approved parties (in 2017), whose caucuses then identify candidates. A federal president ( Bundespräsident ) is elected every five years by a federal convention that reflects the party majorities in the Bundestag and the state parliaments of the 16 German states. Finally, the federal president proposes the name of the de facto head of state, the chancellor ( Bundeskanzler ) to the Bundestag . By contrast, the Electoral College is remarkably straightforward. It is also useful to bear in mind the examples set by some of the nations that do hold direct elections for their heads of state: Afghanistan, Iran, Mexico, Russia, Turkey, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe are just a few. Jettisoning the Electoral College for direct popular elections would not automatically guarantee greater democracy.

It's worth remembering, too, that in 1787, the Constitutional Convention did not inadvertently stumble upon the mechanics of electing a president — the delegates lavished an extraordinary amount of attention on the subject. Edmund Randolph's original "Virginia Plan" for the Constitution had called for the creation of "a National Executive...to be chosen by the National Legislature" with "a general authority to execute the National laws." But the great Pennsylvania jurist James Wilson believed that "[i]f we are to establish a national Government," the president must be chosen by a direct, national vote of the people. Wilson claimed that an executive appointed by either house of the new Congress would be beholden to the legislature and have no resources to restrain legislative overreach. Only "appointment by the people," he insisted, would guarantee a national executive free of such dependence and fully able to keep Congress and the states from careening off the republican track. Gouverneur Morris joined Wilson in arguing (over the course of two days) that

If the Legislature elect, it will be the work of intrigue, of cabal, and of faction; it will be like the election of a pope by a conclave of cardinals....The Legislature will continually seek to aggrandize & perpetuate themselves; and will seize those critical moments produced by war, invasion or convulsion for that purpose. It is necessary then that the Executive Magistrate should be the guardian of the people, even of the lower classes, agst. Legislative tyranny, against the Great & the wealthy who in the course of things will necessarily compose the Legislative body.... The Executive therefore ought to be so constituted as to be the great protector of the Mass of the people.

But wise old Roger Sherman of Connecticut replied that it might be better to have the new Congress select the president; he feared that the direct election of presidents by the people might lead to monarchy. As Madison noted of Sherman, "An independence of the Executive [from] the supreme Legislature, was in his opinion the very essence of tyranny if there was any such thing." Sherman was not trying to undermine the popular will, but to keep it from being distorted by a president who mistook a popular election for a mandate for dictatorship.

Most credit Wilson with being the first to propose a compromise — let the people vote, not for a national executive, but for a group of electors who would then select an executive (on the model of the princely electors of the Holy Roman Empire, who elected a new emperor at the death of an old one). But it was not until the formation of the Committee on Postponed Parts, near the conclusion of the Convention, that it was finally agreed, in the words of Pennsylvania delegate John Dickinson, "that the President should entirely owe his Elevation to the will of the people directly declared through their Organs the Electors." This would grant the president "a broad and solid Base for him to stand upon." And it was no less than James Madison who "took out a Pen and Paper, and sketched out a mode of Electing the President" by a college of "Electors...chosen by those of the people in each State, who shall have the Qualifications requisite."

ONE MAN, ONE VOTE?

Still, historical arguments often carry little weight against sound bites, so it is worthwhile to deal directly with three popular arguments against the Electoral College. The first, that the Electoral College violates the principle of "one man, one vote," is rooted in the constitutional stipulation that each state appoint "a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress." This means, for instance, that the 39 million Californians (who have 53 representatives in Congress, along with their two U.S. senators) are allocated 55 electoral votes for a presidential candidate. Meanwhile, the half-million or so Americans who live in Wyoming get three electoral votes — which means that each Wyoming voter gets 3.6 times more Electoral College clout than each California voter.

This may not be quite equal or, some would argue, quite just. But it is worth remembering that the phrase "one man, one vote" occurs nowhere in the Constitution. It is a judicial creation from Gray v. Sanders , a 1963 case in which the Supreme Court stepped in to end Georgia's use of a county-unit system of counting votes on the grounds that it violated the 14th Amendment. This principle was expanded the next year in Wesberry v. Sanders , which countered inequalities in federal congressional districts, and again a few months later in Reynolds v. Sims , similarly countering deliberate inequalities in state-drawn legislative districts. It was reiterated again four years later in Avery v. Midland County , which concerned municipal districts. Significantly, the Supreme Court has shied away from applying this rule to the U.S. Senate, since the Constitution mandates that every state, no matter its population, elects only two U.S. senators.

A far more likely candidate for judicial scrutiny under the "one man, one vote" rule would be the states themselves. California gave 61.5% of its popular vote to Hillary Clinton, and she collected all 55 of California's electoral votes as a result. But that majority was won in 33 counties, mostly clustered around San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. The rest of the state — 25 counties — went for Trump. These counties had no say whatsoever in how California's electoral votes were cast, despite making up a solid block of the state north of San Francisco.  Is the best solution to such inequity, then, to break up the Electoral College? Or would it be just as equitable, not to say easier, to break up California into two states? Northern Californians could then be represented the way they want — as they have been demanding, in fact, since 1941, when the first proposals were put forward to create a new state from the rural counties of northern California and southern Oregon.  (In all likelihood, this would mean adding two more Republican senators and about 20 more Republican House members, which is why it is unlikely that this particular inequity will be corrected any time soon.)

The disparity in Illinois was even more dramatic. Of the 102 counties in that state, only 11 went Democratic in the 2016 presidential election. Nevertheless, Clinton won the state's popular vote, 3.1 million to 2.1 million, thanks mostly to the Democratic counties clustered in the Chicago area. She was thus granted all of Illinois's 20 electoral votes. Is that fair to the rest of the state? So, break up Illinois — and send still more Republican senators and representatives to Congress. Those who complain that the Electoral College subverts the "one man, one vote" principle should also object to the way the system operates within the states.

SLAVERY AND THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE  

The second popular argument against the Electoral College is that it was designed to protect slavery. The Constitution mandates that each state choose electors up to the combined number of its representatives and senators. The number of representatives is determined by state population, and the Constitution originally permitted states in which slavery was legal to include three-fifths of their slave populations for the purpose of determining the number of representatives they could send to Congress. Hence, states where slavery was legal could artificially inflate their representation in Congress by counting three-fifths of people who were held in bondage — and who had no political standing whatsoever.

Those states received extra, and illegitimate, political leverage. Because that "extra" representation also factored into the number of electoral votes a state could cast, it would seem that the infamous "three-fifths clause" gave slave states an advantage in presidential elections. The clincher for this argument against the Electoral College comes in Akhil Reed Amar's description of how Thomas Jefferson was elected president in 1800:

Southerner Thomas Jefferson, for example, won the election of 1800-01 against Northerner John Adams in a race where the slavery-skew of the electoral college was the decisive margin of victory: without the extra electoral college votes generated by slavery, the mostly southern states that supported Jefferson would not have sufficed to give him a majority . As pointed observers remarked at the time, Thomas Jefferson metaphorically rode into the executive mansion on the backs of slaves.

What this leaves out of the equation, however, is the fact that in 1787 and 1788, as the Constitution was being ratified, slavery was practiced in all of the states (though the Massachusetts Supreme Court had ruled it to be in violation of the state constitution in 1780, and Vermont had officially banned it in 1777). If the three-fifths provision operated to give slave-holding states extra leverage in the Electoral College, it gave that leverage to every state, North and South alike. Pennsylvania adopted a gradual emancipation plan in 1780, but it still had slaves in 1840. New York didn't free its last slaves until 1840. And there were still 18 lifetime "apprentices" in New Jersey when the Civil War broke out. The three-fifths clause gave no advantage to slave states until the Northern states, one by one, abolished slavery.

It could perhaps be argued that there was a vast difference between Northern states, which allowed slavery but had tiny slave populations, and Southern states with mammoth slave populations. But would this have really made a difference in the Electoral College in 1787? Take New York and Virginia, the largest slave states in the North and South, respectively, according to the 1790 census, just after the Constitutional Convention. Subtract the slave population of New York entirely — in other words, no three-fifths clause  — and you would be left with a population of 319,000. Do the same thing for Virginia, and you would get a population of 404,000. Even without the three-fifths clause, Virginia would have been allotted more representatives in Congress and a larger electoral vote.

Amar seeks to find the hidden hand of slavery in the debates of the Convention itself, and it is true that the Convention had no shortage of acrimonious discussion of slavery. But none of it occurred in connection with the equally acrimonious and lengthy debates over the presidency, apart from one peculiar statement uttered by James Madison on July 19, 1787:

If it be a fundamental principle of free Govt. that the Legislative, Executive & Judiciary powers should be separately exercised, it is equally so that they be independently exercised. There is the same & perhaps greater reason why the Executive shd. be independent of the Legislature, than why the Judiciary should: A coalition of the two former powers would be more immediately & certainly dangerous to public liberty....There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.

This statement is exceptionally opaque, and it seems to have no logical connection to the speeches made either before or after concerning the method of electing a president. This has led some to doubt whether Madison even uttered it at the time; he may have interpolated it in one of the many revisions of his notes on the Convention debates. But even taking it at face value, the best sense that can be made of it is that Madison was complaining that Northern states had looser ("more diffusive") rules for determining voter qualifications than Southern states, and thus might have an unfair advantage in a presidential-election system based solely on a direct, popular vote (since, at least proportionally, more Northerners than Southerners would be eligible to vote).

Madison seems to have believed that the three-fifths clause would not adequately mitigate the effects of lenient Northern voter-eligibility rules because no-fifths of the slave population could vote. He appears to have concluded that an Electoral College system based on representation would improve this balance and keep presidential elections from becoming sectional affairs. The idea that the Electoral College was proposed to protect Southern slavery stretches the imagination; if anything, Madison seems to be suggesting that an Electoral College would mute unfair sectional advantages.

Ultimately, the Electoral College contributed to ending slavery, since Abraham Lincoln, having earned only 39.9% of the popular vote in 1860, nevertheless won a crushing victory in the Electoral College — leading many Southern slaveholders to stampede to secession in 1860 and 1861. They could run the numbers as well as anyone, and realized that the Electoral College would only produce more anti-slavery Northern presidents.

STABILITY AND LIBERTY

Finally, some argue that the Electoral College is simply too cumbersome. And it is cumbersome. But the Constitution never set out to create a streamlined national government. The Constitutional Convention was interested in liberty, not efficiency. As such, the Electoral College embodies a fundamental instinct in the founders: Slow down. Ours is a deliberately sedate government, prone to gridlock and unresponsive to immediate pressures. There is good reason for this: The members of the Constitutional Convention had seen how the Revolution produced hyperactivity in state governments eager to distance themselves from the past by making everything into "one man, one vote," all the time. This produced spontaneity; it also produced stupidity.

The Pennsylvania constitution of 1776 is a case in point. It proposed to govern Pennsylvania through a simple, unicameral "assembly of the representatives of the freemen." It abolished all property qualifications for voting (apart from paying "public taxes"), limited legislators to one-year terms and no more than four terms every seven years, and stipulated that elections be held annually every October. But without the checks and balances provided by a bicameral legislature, the new Pennsylvania Assembly bolted ahead to revoke a college charter, override judicial decisions, fix the price of grain, issue £200,000 in tax-anticipation notes, and revoke (temporarily) the charter of Robert Morris's Bank of North America.

This new legislature aligned with the side of the angels by inaugurating a long-term phase-out of slavery in Pennsylvania, but its angels could be inquisitorial: The Assembly passed legislation "for the suppression of vice and immorality" that criminalized "profane swearing, cursing, drunkenness, cock fighting, bullet playing, horse racing, shooting matches and the playing or gaming for money or other valuable things, fighting of duels and such evil practices which tend greatly to debauch the minds and corrupt the morals of the subjects of this commonwealth." It also seized the property of suspected Tories and pacifists, imposed loyalty oaths, and shut down the College of Philadelphia for "an evident hostility to the present Government and Constitution of this State, and in divers particulars, enmity to the common cause." It revived the English practice of passing bills of attainder, and its courts tried 28 people for treason against the commonwealth. Cooler heads in a second house might have tactfully pigeon-holed such legislation. Gouverneur Morris sarcastically asked whether any "man if he confides in the State of Pena...will lend his money or enter into contract? He will tell you no. He sees no stability. He can repose no confidence."

The Constitutional Convention, meeting in Pennsylvania, had a front-row seat for observing the impact of the state's constitution. They walked hurriedly away from it and deliberately diffused decision-making through a separation of powers and a series of checks and balances between the three branches of the new national government — expressly to prevent even well-intentioned power from endangering liberty.

And it bears recollecting that holding a direct presidential election might not be any less cumbersome than the Electoral College. Counting (and worse, recounting ) votes on a nationwide basis when the margin between two candidates is half a percent (as it was in 2000) would be even more unwieldy than the current system.

There are, in fact, some unsought benefits in the Electoral College (unsought in the sense that they formed no part of its original rationale). First, the Electoral College forces candidates to appeal to a wider range of voters. A direct, national popular vote would incentivize campaigns to focus almost exclusively on densely populated urban areas; Clinton's popular-vote edge in 2016 arose from Democratic voting in just two places — Los Angeles and Chicago. Without the need to win the electoral votes of Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania, few candidates would bother to campaign there. Of course, the Electoral College still narrows the focus of our elections: Instead of appealing to two states, candidates end up appealing to 10 or 12, and leave the others just as neglected. But campaigning in 10 or 12 states is better than trying to score points in just two.

Another unsought benefit of the Electoral College is that it discourages voter fraud. There is little incentive for political parties to play registration or ballot-box-stuffing games in Montana, Idaho, or Kansas — they simply won't get much bang for their buck in terms of the electoral totals of those states. But if presidential elections were based on national totals, then fraud could be conducted everywhere and still count; it is unlikely that law enforcement would be able to track down every instance of voter fraud across the entire country.

A final unforeseen benefit of the Electoral College is that it reduces the likelihood that third-party candidates will garner enough votes to make it onto the electoral scoreboard. Without the Electoral College, there would be no effective brake on the number of "viable" presidential candidates. Abolish it, and it would not be difficult to imagine a scenario in which, in a field of dozens of micro-candidates, the "winner" would need only 10% of the vote, and would represent less than 5% of the electorate. Presidents elected with smaller and smaller pluralities would only aggravate the sense that the executive branch governs without a real electoral mandate.

The fundamental problem in all democracies is legitimacy — if sovereignty resides in the people, and all the people have a say, what is to keep the people from breaking up into tiny splinters of violent political difference? The Electoral College, then, is an engine of legitimacy: Since 1900, 17 out of 29 U.S. elections have been decided by 200 or more electoral votes.

A CONSTITUTIONAL BRAKE

The Electoral College has been a significant, if poorly comprehended, mechanism for stability, liberty, and legitimacy — all of which democracies can too easily come to undermine. There is little substance to the complaint that the Electoral College was intended as an elitist brake on the popular will, since electors have rarely bucked the popular vote in their states. (For example, one District of Columbia elector cast a blank ballot in 2000; one Minnesota John Kerry elector cast a vote for John Edwards in 2004; and in 2016 five Clinton electors and two Trump electors bolted for other candidates.) And the idea that a national popular vote would lead to clearer and more representative results ignores the nature of our constitutional republic and fails to contemplate the challenges that a truly national election in our vast country would involve.

If anything, the Electoral College was designed to act as a brake on over-mighty presidents, who might use a popular majority to claim that they were authorized to speak for the people against Congress. And from that, we may well have a lot more to fear than from the Electoral College.

Allen Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era, and director of Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College. 

The Case for Proportional Voting

Lee drutman.

Why We Need Traditional Banking

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Is the Electoral College the BEST way to choose a president? A Current and Controversial Issue Discussion

The Electoral College has been a consistent current and societal issue for discussion in civics classrooms. Great discussions, much like great lesson plans, rarely just happen. They take intention, structure, and planning. Keth Magnuson, a civics, AP Government, World History, and Holocaust Studies educator in Falmouth, Maine is one of the thirty-three participants in the Fall 2021 Guardians of Democracy Microcredential Program facilitated by the Illinois Civics Hub . This community of practice allows educators from around the country to collaborate as they hone their skills in the proven practices of civic education . 

Keith recently earned his Silver Badge in Using Current and Controversial Issue Discussions in the Classroom where he developed, implemented, and reflected on a lesson in which students explored and deliberated essential and supporting questions related to the Electoral College. We asked Keith to share his experience in facilitating this classroom discussion. Here are his responses.

Briefly describe your topic for your current and controversial issue discussion. What prompt did you use? Why is this an open and relevant issue for students?

We used this lesson on the Electoral College in an AP Government and Politics and a heterogeneous Civics class this past October at Falmouth High School in Maine. The overall prompt was: “To what extent is the Electoral College effective?” This is an open and highly relevant question in the world of government and politics today, as it has been a topic of much public debate for at least two decades and will continue to be widely debated for the foreseeable future.  There are varying points of view on this topic across society and both sides have valid arguments that can be drawn from a variety of sources.  Because of the high profile of the 2016 and 2020 elections, it is a topic that students are aware of and interested in. They are eager to learn more about it in an in-depth and balanced manner.

What strategy did you use for this discussion? Why did you choose this strategy? 

My strategy for this was actually two-fold. We first used the Structured Academic Controversy (SAC). This strategy was perfect for the issue because the first prompt allowed us to break the controversy down into a binary choice:  “Is the Electoral College the best way to choose a President? “. The SAC had students engaged in a close reading of sources, evaluating which arguments/evidence best support their assigned perspective, and gave every student a detailed look at the pros and cons of the Electoral College in an evidence-based manner. After we completed the SAC (we stopped short of the debriefing portion of the typical SAC procedure), the class transitioned into a Socratic Seminar . 

In the Seminar, students were given a slightly different prompt: “By what process should we choose a President?”. The Socratic Seminar provided a good forum for more nuanced discussion of the evidence, the various details of all of the options in this situation, and an opportunity to participate in a wider discussion of how our democracy might reach a productive conclusion. The combination of these two strategies worked perfectly in this situation as we moved from a small group, binary choice SAC into a large group, more open discussion of the various options in the seminar. Each student evaluated/used sources, presented the evidence for one of two perspectives in the SAC, actively listened to the opposing perspective in the SAC, and then participated in a large group discussion that included the pros and cons of other possible methods of choosing a President- mainly the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact and the Congressional District Method . In totality, this entire academic exercise provided students with a really in-depth understanding of the various options and perspectives within the national debate over the Electoral College.

How did students gain the necessary background knowledge for this discussion?  

For AP Government, the students did the first round of research at home, on their own.  In Civics, we did the whole thing in class. This worked out well for both classes as students were well prepared in both instances. In the case of AP Gov, doing some of it for homework saved us one class period and since they had about a week to complete the research, every student was ready to go on the day of the SAC. In Civics, they worked in groups during a class period. This also worked well as students were able to help each other out, divide up the work, and see me immediately with any questions or confusion. The actual assignment both groups were doing was working through a series of research questions about elections and the Electoral College using the website 270towin.com . On the site, they accessed several different historical elections to gain an understanding of how the Electoral College has worked historically and also were able to manipulate the 2024 map (or any other) to explore different scenarios. Leading up to this we read relevant excerpts from the U.S. Constitution in class and clarified the dynamics of the Electoral College so each student would have a basic grasp of the system ahead of looking at these election results.

How did this activity deepen students’ disciplinary content knowledge and/or meet learning targets?

Students learned about the Electoral College, elections in general, and the other viable options for choosing a President at a very high level in both classes. In addition to straight content (how the Electoral College works for instance), we were able to really focus on the political theory underpinning representative government, understanding multiple perspectives, and working on building consensus.  As a teacher of civics/government, amongst my primary objectives, are always to facilitate a greater understanding and appreciation of representative democracy and the ability to be productive democratic citizens in our society.  I believe that this lesson accomplished both of those objectives.  

How did this project deepen students’ knowledge of themselves and their community?

Students were directly asked to think about their feelings towards the Electoral College and ascertain whether those feelings were more political (their preferred candidates are perceived to either benefit or be at a disadvantage because of the EC- and that’s how they form their opinion on it) or if their feelings about it are more based on what they value/prioritize in a representative democracy.  Students are continuously asked this same basic question throughout the year and it, eventually, leads to greater self-awareness and some critical thinking about what they value within our representative democracy.

Students were definitely challenged to think about the Electoral College in this unit in a non-partisan, evidence-based manner and ask tough questions as to what their own feelings towards it are and why they feel that way. At the end of the unit, each student wrote about their final opinion on the topic- using the evidence they found most compelling during the SAC / SS.  There was a pretty even split between students in favor of keeping/replacing the Electoral College in its current form. In all cases, responses were very thoughtful and solution-oriented. Here are some excerpts from their reflections:

• All things considered, the electoral college is not the best way to elect a president due to its poor representation of the people and vote power inflation. In general, the process by which the president is elected is crucial to following the general will of the public.
• During presidential elections, the Electoral College puts American citizens at a disadvantage. The Electoral College favors swing states over safe states. The process does not encourage limited government. Instead, it lessens the citizens’ power. The Electoral College can disregard the popular vote, therefore ignoring the majority opinion. The Electoral College fails to address the overall needs of the American people. 
• The Electoral College balances the power between large and small states making it a fair system to elect presidents now and for years to come.  Keep in mind the electoral college accurately represented the people in 54/59 elections, and in the 5 elections it didn’t, it accurately represented the majority of states that voted for that candidate.
• If we were to implement another form of voting we would essentially be trading out our current problems for other problems. The perfect election process does not exist and if we are to chase a perfect voting solution we will never reach it. For example, if we were to implement a population vote then although all votes would be equally represented, politicians would unequally cater towards those in urban areas still causing an imbalance. In other words, by solving a problem you start another one that has the same outcome- certain groups of people feel unrepresented in certain years.

What comes next? What did students identify as future opportunities to address this issue?

One of our essential questions for the semester in Civics is “To what extent is our democracy representative?”. I do two-week units on several different supporting questions that have students study multiple perspectives on the Electoral College, Redistricting /Gerrymandering, and Voting Rights vs Voter Fraud: What’s the priority?. Students use these three units to form an evidence-based claim to the essential question. Towards the end of the semester, each student chooses issues they care about and would like to express their opinion in a letter to the editor and then in a letter to a person of influence. Both of these are opportunities where a student could choose to address the Electoral College as part of our “taking informed action” portion of the course.

What advice would you give teachers thinking about opportunities for engaging their students in classroom discussions?

I would advise teachers to take advantage of all of the opportunities that exist to engage students in authentic discussions of controversial issues.  There is so much to be gained from activities like this- students evaluated sources, engaged in evidence-based discourse with their peers, heard good evidence to support many different perspectives in the issue, did their best to work in a solutions-oriented approach to build consensus, and all students came out of the activity with an appreciation of this many-sided, complex issue. 

In doing similar activities on a variety of topics throughout the year, students are learning to find/use evidence and understand that there are multiple valid points of view on most issues  Most importantly, these discussions explicitly teach and have students practice how to engage in a positive and productive dialogue with fellow citizens- even those with whom they disagree. They learn that we must speak respectfully in these discussions and try to build consensus. If we are trying to prepare students to be civically minded and productive democratic citizens, then I think it is imperative to engage all students in these types of activities as much as possible.

The good news is that there are so many great resources out there to make implementing these activities less daunting. Other teachers, website s, and workshops are all readily available so that none of us are on our own in this undertaking. I would particularly recommend taking a Guardians of Democracy course as a good place to get started.

The Electoral College – Top 3 Pros and Cons

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The debate over the continued use of the Electoral College resurfaced during the 2016 presidential election , when Donald Trump lost the general election to Hillary Clinton by over 2.8 million votes and won the Electoral College by 74 votes. The official general election results indicate that Trump received 304 Electoral College votes and 46.09% of the popular vote (62,984,825 votes), and Hillary Clinton received 227 Electoral College votes and 48.18% of the popular vote (65,853,516 votes). [ 1 ]

Prior to the 2016 election, there were four times in U.S. history when a candidate won the presidency despite losing the popular vote: 1824 ( John Quincy Adams over Andrew Jackson ), 1876 ( Rutherford B. Hayes over Samuel Tilden ), 1888 ( Benjamin Harrison over Grover Cleveland ), and 2000 ( George W. Bush over Al Gore ). [ 2 ]

The Electoral College was established in 1788 by Article II of the U.S. Constitution , which also established the executive branch of the U.S. government, and was revised by the Twelfth Amendment (ratified June 15, 1804), the Fourteenth Amendment (ratified July 1868), and the Twenty-Third Amendment (ratified Mar. 29, 1961). Because the procedure for electing the president is part of the Constitution, a Constitutional Amendment (which requires two-thirds approval in both houses of Congress plus approval by 38 states) would be required to abolish the Electoral College. [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ] [ 6 ]

The Founding Fathers created the Electoral College as a compromise between electing the president via a vote in Congress only or via a popular vote only. The Electoral College comprises 538 electors; each state is allowed one elector for each Representative and Senator (D.C. is allowed 3 electors as established by the Twenty-Third Amendment). [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ] [ 6 ]

In each state, a group of electors is chosen by each political party. On election day, voters choosing a presidential candidate are actually casting a vote for an elector. Most states use the “winner-take-all” method, in which all electoral votes are awarded to the winner of the popular vote in that state. In Nebraska and Maine, the candidate that wins the state’s overall popular vote receives two electors, and one elector from each congressional district is apportioned to the popular vote winner in that district. For a candidate to win the presidency, they must win at least 270 Electoral College votes. [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ] [ 6 ]

At least 700 amendments have been proposed to modify or abolish the Electoral College. [ 25 ]

A Sep. 2020 Gallup poll found 61% of Americans were in favor of abolishing the Electoral College, up 12 points from 2016. [ 24 ]

For the 2020 election, electors voted on Dec. 14, and delivered the results on Dec. 23. On Jan. 6, 2021, Congress held a joint session to certify the electoral college votes during which several Republican lawmakers objected to the results and pro-Trump protesters stormed the U.S. Capitol sending Vice President Pence, lawmakers and staff to secure locations. The votes were certified in the early hours of Jan. 7, 2021 by Vice President Pence, declaring Joe Biden the 46th U.S. President. President Joe Biden was inaugurated with Vice President Kamala Harris on Jan. 20, 2021. [ 23 ] [ 26 ]

Should the United States Use the Electoral College in Presidential Elections?

Pro 1 The Electoral College ensures that that all parts of the country are involved in selecting the President of the United States. If the election depended solely on the popular vote, then candidates could limit campaigning to heavily-populated areas or specific regions. To win the election, presidential candidates need electoral votes from multiple regions and therefore they build campaign platforms with a national focus, meaning that the winner will actually be serving the needs of the entire country. Without the electoral college, groups such as Iowa farmers and Ohio factory workers would be ignored in favor of pandering to metropolitan areas with higher population densities, leaving rural areas and small towns marginalized. [ 11 ] [ 12 ] [ 13 ] “The current Electoral College system creates a needed balance between rural and urban interests and ensures that the winning candidate has support from multiple regions of the country,” according to Tina Mulally, South Dakota Representative. She argues that the Electoral College protects small state and minority interests and that a national popular vote would be ““like two wolves and a sheep deciding what’s for dinner.” [ 32 ] Read More

Pro 2 The Electoral College was created to protect the voices of the minority from being overwhelmed by the will of the majority. The Founding Fathers wanted to balance the will of the populace against the risk of “tyranny of the majority,” in which the voices of the masses can drown out minority interests. [ 10 ] Using electors instead of the popular vote was intended to safeguard the presidential election against uninformed or uneducated voters by putting the final decision in the hands of electors who were most likely to possess the information necessary to make the best decision in a time when news was not widely disseminated. [ 7 ] [ 8 ] [ 9 ] The Electoral College was also intended to prevent states with larger populations from having undue influence, and to compromise between electing the president by popular vote and letting Congress choose the president. [ 7 ] [ 8 ] [ 9 ] According to Alexander Hamilton, the Electoral College is if “not perfect, it is at least excellent,” because it ensured “that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.” [ 7 ] Former Democratic Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak vetoed a measure in 2019 that would add the state to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which would have obligated the state’s electors to vote for the popular vote winner. Sisolak stated, the compact “could diminish the role of smaller states like Nevada in national electoral contests and force Nevada’s electors to side with whoever wins the nationwide popular vote, rather than the candidate Nevadans choose.” [ 31 ] “The Framers’ fears of a ‘tyranny of the majority’ is still very relevant today. One can see its importance in the fact that despite Hillary Clinton’s national popular vote total, she won only about a sixth of the counties nationwide, with her support limited mostly to urban areas on both coasts,” explains Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former commissioner for the FEC. [ 34 ] Read More

Pro 3 The Electoral College can preclude calls for recounts or demands for run-off elections, giving certainty to presidential elections. If the election were based on popular vote, it would be possible for a candidate to receive the highest number of popular votes without actually obtaining a majority. [ 11 ] This happened with President Nixon in 1968 and President Clinton in 1992, when both men won the most electoral votes while receiving just 43% of the popular vote. The existence of the Electoral College precluded calls for recounts or demands for run-off elections. [ 11 ] “There is pressure for runoff elections when no candidate wins a majority of the votes cast; that pressure, which would greatly complicate the presidential election process, is reduced by the Electoral College, which invariably produces a clear winner,” explains Richard A. Posner, judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. [ 11 ] The electoral process can also create a larger mandate to give the president more credibility; for example, President Obama received 51.3% of the popular vote in 2012 but 61.7% of the electoral votes. [ 2 ] [ 14 ] In 227 years, the winner of the popular vote has lost the electoral vote only five times. This proves the system is working. [ 2 ] [ 14 ] Read More

Con 1 The Electoral College gives too much power to swing states and allows the presidential election to be decided by a handful of states. The two main political parties can count on winning the electoral votes in certain states, such as California for the Democratic Party and Indiana for the Republican Party, without worrying about the actual popular vote totals. Because of the Electoral College, presidential candidates only need to pay attention to a limited number of states that can swing one way or the other. [ 18 ] A Nov. 6, 2016 episode of PBS NewsHour reveals that “Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have made more than 90% of their campaign stops in just 11 so-called battleground states. Of those visits, nearly two-thirds took place in the four battlegrounds with the most electoral votes — Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and North Carolina.” [ 19 ] Gautam Mukunda, political scientist at Harvard University , explains that states are given electors based on its representation in the House and Senate, so small states get extra votes. Mukunda states, “The fact that in presidential elections people in Wyoming have [nearly four] times the power of people in California is antithetical at the most basic level to what we say we stand for as a democracy.” [ 33 ] Read More

Con 2 The Electoral College is rooted in slavery and racism. The “minority” interests the Founding Fathers intended the Electoral College to protect were those of slaveowners and states with legal slavery. James Madison stated, “There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.” [ 29 ] “Behind Madison’s statement were the stark facts: The populations in the North and South were approximately equal, but roughly one-third of those living in the South were held in bondage. Because of its considerable, nonvoting slave population, that region would have less clout under a popular-vote system. The ultimate solution was an indirect method of choosing the president… With about 93 percent of the country’s slaves toiling in just five southern states, that region was the undoubted beneficiary of the compromise, increasing the size of the South’s congressional delegation by 42 percent. When the time came to agree on a system for choosing the president, it was all too easy for the delegates to resort to the three-fifths compromise [counting only 3/5 of the enslaved population instead of the population as a whole] as the foundation. The peculiar system that emerged was the Electoral College,” explains Wilfred Codrington III, assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School and a fellow at the Brennan Center., [ 29 ] The racism at the root of the Electoral College persists, suppressing the votes of people of color in favor of voters from largely homogeneously white states. [ 29 ] [ 30 ] Read More

Con 3 Democracy should function on the will of the people, allowing one vote per adult. There are over an estimated 337 million people in the United States. But just 538 people decide who will be president; that’s about 0.000156% of the population deciding the president. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by more than one million votes, yet still lost the election on electoral votes. [ 14 ] [ 35 ] [ 36 ] [ 37 ] “Do we really want 538 Bob Nemanichs electing our president? …You can’t let 538 people decide the fate of a country of 300 million people,” says Robert Nemanich, math teacher and former elector from Colorado Springs, Colorado. [ 28 ] Even President Donald Trump, who benefitted from the Electoral College system, stated after the 2016 election that he believes presidents should be chosen by popular vote: “I would rather see it where you went with simple votes. You know, you get 100 million votes and somebody else gets 90 million votes and you win.” Just as in 2000 when George W. Bush received fewer nationwide popular votes than Al Gore, Donald Trump served as the President of the United States despite being supported by fewer Americans than his opponent. [ 2 ] [ 20 ] “If anything, representative democracy in the 21st century is about political equality. It’s about one person, one vote — everybody’s vote counting equally. You’re not going to convince a majority of Americans that that’s not how you should do it,” says Jesse Wegman, author of Let the People Pick the President . [ 33 ] John Koza, Chairman of National Popular Vote, warns, “At this point I think changing the system to something better is going to determine whether there’s a dictator in this country.” [ 27 ] Read More

Discussion Questions

1. Should the Electoral College be abolished? Why or why not?

2. Should the Electoral College be modified? How and why? Or why not?

3. What other voting reforms would you make? Rank choice voting? Voter ID laws? Make a list and offer support for each reform. If you would not change the voting process, make a list of reforms and why you would not choose to enact them.

Take Action

1. Listen to a Constitution Center podcast exploring the pros and cons of the Electoral College.

2. Explore the Electoral College via the U.S. National Archives .

3. Consider the American Bar Association’s fact check on whether the Electoral College can be abolished.

4. Consider how you felt about the issue before reading this article. After reading the pros and cons on this topic, has your thinking changed? If so, how? List two to three ways. If your thoughts have not changed, list two to three ways your better understanding of the “other side of the issue” now helps you better argue your position.

5. Push for the position and policies you support by writing U.S. senators and representatives .

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Natalie Leppard Managing Editor [email protected]

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A definitive case against the Electoral College

Why the framers created the Electoral College — and why we need to get rid of it.

by Sean Illing

One of the biggest problems with American democracy is that it’s not democratic .

Two of the last five presidents were elected despite losing the popular vote, more than half the Senate is elected by roughly 18 percent of the population, and voting districts are increasingly gerrymandered in ways that disenfranchise the people who live there.

Our process for choosing the president, the Electoral College, is probably the strangest and most explicitly anti-democratic feature of the American political system. It was conceived in part as a firewall against majority will in case the mob ever elected someone grotesquely unqualified for the office. ( It, uh, didn’t work .)

But the history is more complicated than that. Akhil Reed Amar , a constitutional scholar at Yale, has argued that the Electoral College was a concession to the slave states at the time of the founding. Another popular theory is that the Electoral College was designed to prevent presidential candidates from ignoring the smaller, less populated states.

Whatever the case, there’s no denying that the Electoral College is anti-democratic. According to Democratic data scientist David Shor , “The Electoral College bias is now such that realistically [Democrats] have to win by 3.5 to 4 percent in order to win presidential elections.” So why is it still around? What purpose does it serve today? And more importantly, can we get rid of it?

Jesse Wegman, an editorial board member at the New York Times, has made a definitive case against the Electoral College in his book Let the People Pick the President . Among other things, Wegman argues that the Electoral College creates a false picture of a country reduced to red and blue states when, in fact, the United States is a purple country — and Americans pay a huge price for upholding a system that doesn’t represent that diversity.

I spoke to Wegman about the shoddy origins of the Electoral College and why he thinks we have to eliminate it back in July, but the conversation is still relevant. Joe Biden has opened up a wide lead over Donald Trump in the national polls , but the race is by no means over, thanks to the Electoral College. If Trump loses the popular vote by a few million votes and somehow manages to win the election by securing 270 electoral votes, discontent over this antidemocratic relic may well boil over.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing

You explain in the book how slipshod and hurried the process of conceiving the Electoral College was. No one really believed in it all that much and it was cobbled together at the last minute and only adopted because every other idea failed to win enough support. Were there any justifiable reasons for creating it in the first place?

Jesse Wegman

You can certainly look at things from the framers’ perspective and say it’s understandable that they were concerned about how to elect the president. It had never been done before. They were building this out of whole cloth and the concerns that they had were real.

One of the major concerns was that many of the delegates didn’t want Congress involved in electing the president since they had just created a system built on a separation of powers. Another concern was that citizens would never be able to make an informed decision about national candidates because they just wouldn’t have the information they needed, given the nature of communications technology back then.

What would you say was the foremost reason they created the Electoral College?

I don’t think there was a foremost purpose. As you said, they were scrambling to get this thing done and they debated it endlessly for something like 21 days. And none of the other proposals, like a national popular vote, had enough support to get into the Constitution.

But I’d say the driving force was to get the Constitution finished and sent out for ratification. Beyond that, the main issues were keeping the election of the president out of Congress’s hands and ensuring the electors who made up the Electoral College knew who the candidates were and could make wise decisions.

And then of course you had the immovable obstacle of slavery and ensuring that the slave-holding states didn’t unravel the whole process. James Madison himself said during the middle of the convention that “the popular vote is the fittest way to elect a president,” but that the South wouldn’t go for it. And he says this more than once. So it’s clear that the Founders knew the slave states had a ton of leverage.

We know the process of passing it was flawed. We know it was the product of brutal compromises. But has the Electoral College ever operated the way it was intended to operate?

No — with the possible exception of the first two elections when George Washington was on the ticket. But after that, we basically had electors who were not operating in what the framers thought of as the best interests of the country. The electors were just party hacks. That was clear by 1796, and it’s just as clear today. The electors have never been these disinterested, neutral, wise men the founders imagined.

Why have all the attempts to reform or abolish the Electoral College failed?

I think that the most common reason is because one or both political parties have seen themselves as benefiting from it in some way. So it’s almost always a short-term political calculus that keeps the college alive. It’s very rare that it’s about anything relating to democratic principles or some notion of what’s fair or just. No one thinks the Electoral College was a brilliant constitutional invention, but it’s been preserved over the years for political reasons.

Okay, but the dynamics have changed, right? Now the Electoral College benefits the Republican Party almost exclusively.

You’re right that the college has typically leaned toward one party or the other — that was true in 2016 and almost certainly true for 2020. But I’d also say that it’s harder than we think to say that definitively in advance of an election.

Republicans won the 2004 election, but the Electoral College actually gave the Democrats a boost. If 60,000 votes went the other way in Ohio, George W. Bush would have won the national popular vote by 3 million votes, but John Kerry would’ve been elected. So the advantages aren’t so fixed.

But yes, I concede the point you’re making: Right now, the Electoral College benefits Republicans pretty clearly, and a split election is much, much more likely to go the Republican candidate.

A lot of people who hear these sorts of objections to the Electoral College think it’s just sour grapes from liberals who don’t like the current outcome of the system. How do you respond to that?

I’m as upset as anybody who experienced their preferred candidate winning more votes and not being elected. I think it violates our basic sense of what majority rule means. All I would say to those people is, look at Trump’s tweet in 2012 arguing that the Electoral College is a disaster for democracy. The circumstances of that tweet is that on Election Night 2012, early exit polling was suggesting that Mitt Romney might win the popular vote and lose the Electoral College to Obama. So the mere possibility that that could happen triggered Trump’s tweet, and all I’ll say is that I sympathize.

And it’s actually happened twice in the last 20 years for Democrats —

Right! And I’ll bet any amount of money that the moment it happened in the other direction, you would see exactly the same reaction from the other side, and that’s because everybody in their gut feels the unfairness of a system that does not put the person with the most votes in the White House.

What would you say is the biggest myth or misconception about the Electoral College?

This idea that somehow small states currently have a voice under the Electoral College system, and that they would lose that voice under a popular vote, is just the exact inverse of reality. Right now, small states have no voice because they, like big states and medium-size states across the country, are not battleground states. The only states that matter in a winner-take-all Electoral College scenario are battleground states, and those are the states where the candidates spend virtually 100 percent of their time and money trying to win.

There are 13 states with three or four electoral votes. We call those the small states. One of those states, New Hampshire, is a battleground state. New Hampshire gets more attention from both campaigns every four years than all the other 12 small states combined. The small states are a complete nonentity right now.

What about the claim that big cities would dominate a popular election?

As a factual mathematical matter, that’s just untrue. The biggest cities in the country don’t come close to having enough votes to swing a national election. They can’t even swing elections for governor in their own states. New York City didn’t vote for George Pataki . Los Angeles didn’t vote for Pete Wilson in 1990. The 50 biggest cities in the country represent about 15 percent of the population . Even in fairly big cities with more than 350,000 people or so, roughly 40 percent of the vote goes to Republican candidates — and in any case it’s far from zero. And often in rural areas, the same electoral math holds.

And then just by comparison, the rural areas of America also represent about 15 percent of the population, and they vote about 60/40 in favor of the Republicans. So big cities and rural America are essentially a wash in every presidential election. So the idea that big cities would somehow suddenly decide who the president was for everybody else is just wrong on the math.

A central focus of your book is this idea that ending the Electoral College would change the way candidates campaign and therefore the sorts of issues they prioritize. Why is that a big deal?

It’s a great question, and I think it really gets to the heart of what the problem is here. When candidates only visit a few states and even a few regions in those few states, you really see a warping of policy priorities. Both Democratic and Republican candidates focus on issues that are important to, say, coal miners in Pennsylvania or auto workers in Michigan, but those aren’t the only issues in the country. And if you have a campaign that is forced to pay attention to everyone in the country and has to treat every vote as equally important, which is what a popular vote election would be, this would solve these problems and it would be more fair to the country as a whole.

Issues like immigration reform, health care reform, background checks on guns — these are things that the vast majority of the country supports, and it’s very hard to get presidential candidates to really get behind them if they aren’t the key issues for voters in battleground states.

The most common defense of the Electoral College is that it’s a kind of last-resort firewall against a manifestly unfit president. Now, obviously, our current president proves how useless that firewall is, but is there a case, in principle at least, for keeping the Electoral College on these grounds?

No, it’s a terrible reason. And you just explained why: Donald Trump. If ever there was a candidate who should have been stopped by what we think the Electoral College was designed to do, it was Donald Trump in 2016. But the reverse happened. So the reality is that the Electoral College has never really worked as a firewall against unfit candidates because it’s a fundamentally partisan institution. The 2016 election ought to put an end to this argument forever.

There’s at least one way to effectively end the Electoral College without technically abolishing it. Can you explain what that is?

It’s called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact , and it’s a quite simple way of using the Electoral College that the framers designed as a means to a popular vote. It’s not an end-run around the college, as people like to call it. It draws on the Constitution, which gives states almost total authority to award their electors however they want. So the idea is that states who join it agree to award all of their electors to whichever candidate wins the most votes in the nation, not in their state, which is how most states do it now. It’s an elegant and clever solution to this problem.

Do you think we reach a breaking point where the status quo loses its legitimacy and we’re confronted with a genuine political crisis?

People often say to me, “Well, how is this ever going to happen? Republicans have to get on board, and they’re never going to do it.” Everybody always has a reason for explaining why this isn’t going to work. I think that overestimates the American people’s tolerance for a system in which majority rule is violated repeatedly. If this happens again in 2020, I think you’ll see a much stronger push to get the compact passed in a few other states that are right now either considering it or may soon.

We’re in a moment where people are thinking about constitutional reform in a way that they rarely do, and there’s an openness to changing our basic structures and to question our basic assumptions about how government works. The way we pick our president is one of the prime places where those new ways of thinking could really lead to concrete change.

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Electoral College Pros and Cons

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The Electoral College system , long a source of controversy, came under especially heavy criticism after the 2016 presidential election when Republican Donald Trump lost the nationwide popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton by over 2.8 million votes but won the Electoral College—and thus the presidency—by 74 electoral votes .

• Gives the smaller states an equal voice.
• Prevents disputed outcomes ensuring a peaceful transition of power
• Reduces the costs of national presidential campaigns.
• Can disregard the will of the majority.
• Gives too few states too much electoral power.
• Reduces voter participation by creating a “my vote doesn’t matter” feeling.

By its very nature, the Electoral College system is confusing . When you vote for a presidential candidate, you are actually voting for a group of electors from your state who have all “pledged” to vote for your candidate. Each state is allowed one elector for each of its Representatives and Senators in Congress. There are currently 538 electors, and to be elected, a candidate must get the votes of at least 270 electors.

The Obsolescence Debate

The Electoral College system was established by Article II of the U.S. Constitution in 1788. The Founding Fathers chose it as a compromise between allowing Congress to choose the president and having the president elected directly by the popular vote of the people. The Founders believed that most common citizens of the day were poorly educated and uninformed on political issues. Consequently, they decided that using the “proxy” votes of the well-informed electors would lessen the risk of “tyranny of the majority,” in which the voices of the minority are drowned out by those of the masses. Additionally, the Founders reasoned that the system would prevent states with larger populations from having an unequal influence on the election.

Critics, however, argue that Founder’s reasoning is no longer relevant as today’s voters are better-educated and have virtually unlimited access to information and to the candidates’ stances on the issues. In addition, while the Founders considered the electors as being “free from any sinister bias” in 1788, electors today are selected by the political parties and are usually “pledged” to vote for the party’s candidate regardless of their own beliefs.

Today, opinions on the future of the Electoral College range from protecting it as the basis of American democracy to abolishing it completely as an ineffective and obsolete system that may not accurately reflect the will of the people. What are some of the main advantages and disadvantages of the Electoral College?

Advantages of the Electoral College 

• Promotes fair regional representation: The Electoral College gives the small states an equal voice. If the president was elected by the popular vote alone, candidates would mold their platforms to cater to the more populous states. Candidates would have no desire to consider, for example, the needs of farmers in Iowa or commercial fishermen in Maine.
• Provides a clean-cut outcome: Thanks to the Electoral College, presidential elections usually come to a clear and undisputed end. There is no need for wildly expensive nationwide vote recounts. If a state has significant voting irregularities, that state alone can do a recount. In addition, the fact that a candidate must gain the support of voters in several different geographic regions promotes the national cohesion needed to ensure a peaceful transfer of power.
• Makes campaigns less costly: Candidates rarely spend much time—or money—campaigning in states that traditionally vote for their party’s candidates. For example, Democrats rarely campaign in liberal-leaning California, just as Republicans tend to skip the more conservative Texas. Abolishing the Electoral College could make America’s many campaign financing problems even worse.   

Disadvantages of the Electoral College  

• Can override the popular vote: In five presidential elections so far—1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016—a candidate lost the nationwide popular vote but was elected president by winning the Electoral College vote. This potential to override the “will of the majority” is often cited as the main reason to abolish the Electoral College.
• Gives the swing states too much power: The needs and issues of voters in the 14 swing states —those that have historically voted for both Republican and Democratic presidential candidates—get a higher level of consideration than voters in other states. The candidates rarely visit the predictable non-swing states, like Texas or California. Voters in the non-swing states will see fewer campaign ads and be polled for their opinions less often voters in the swing states. As a result, the swing states, which may not necessarily represent the entire nation, hold too much electoral power.
• Makes people feel their vote doesn’t matter: Under the Electoral College system, while it counts, not every vote “matters.” For example, a Democrat’s vote in liberal-leaning California has far less effect on the election’s final outcome that it would in one of the less predictable swing states like Pennsylvania, Florida, and Ohio. The resulting lack of interest in non-swing states contributes to America’s traditionally low voter turnout rate .

The Bottom Line

Abolishing the Electoral College would require a constitutional amendment , a lengthy and often unsuccessful process. However, there are proposals to “reform” the Electoral College without abolishing it. One such movement, the National Popular Vote plan would ensure that the winner of the popular vote would also win at least enough Electoral College votes to be elected president. Another movement is attempting to convince states to split their electoral vote based on the percentage of the state’s popular vote for each candidate. Eliminating the winner-take-all requirement of the Electoral College at the state level would lessen the tendency for the swing states to dominate the electoral process.

The Popular Vote Plan Alternative

As an alternative to the long and unlikely method amending the Constitution, critics of the Electoral College are now perusing the National Popular Vote plan designed to ensure that the candidate who wins the overall popular vote in inaugurated president.

Based on Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution granting the states the exclusive power to control how their electoral votes are awarded, the National Popular Vote plan requires the legislature of each participating state to enact a bill agreeing that the state will award all of its electoral votes to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, regardless of the outcome of the popular vote in that specific state.

The National Popular Vote would go into effect when states controlling 270—a simple majority—of the total 538 electoral votes. As of July 2020, a National Popular Vote bill has been signed into law in 16 states controlling a total of 196 electoral votes, including 4 small states, 8 medium-sized states, 3 big states (California, Illinois, and New York), and the District of Columbia. Thus, the National Popular Vote plan will take effect when enacted by states controlling an additional 74 electoral votes.  

Sources and Further Reference

• “From Bullets to Ballots: The Election of 1800 and the First Peaceful Transfer of Political Power.” TeachingAmericanHistory.org , https://teachingamericanhistory.org/resources/zvesper/chapter1/.
• Hamilton, Alexander. “The Federalist Papers: No. 68 (The Mode of Electing the President).” congress.gov , Mar. 14, 1788, https://www.congress.gov/resources/display/content/The+Federalist+Papers#TheFederalistPapers-68.
• Meko, Tim. “How Trump won the presidency with razor-thin margins in swing states.” Washington Post (Nov. 11, 2016), https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-election/swing-state-margins/.
• How the US Electoral College System Works
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U.S. Constitution.net

Electoral college explained, historical development.

The Electoral College, as outlined in Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution , was established as a compromise between election of the President by Congress and election by popular vote. The founders aimed to form a buffer between population and the selection of a President, which originally involved electors chosen by the state legislatures.

The system underwent significant changes with the 12th Amendment , ratified in 1804, following a highly problematic election in 1800 where Thomas Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr, tied in electoral votes, throwing the election to the House of Representatives. This amendment mandated separate Electoral College votes for President and Vice President to avoid similar confusion in the future.

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, tweaks to the Electoral College arose predominantly through changes in how states chose their electors. Initially, state legislatures selected electors, but by the mid-19th century, all states had shifted to popular elections. Some states originally allowed their legislatures to represent the voter's intent, but this has largely fallen out of practice except in rare instances of legislative interposition.

By the time of the contentious 1876 election between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel J. Tilden, wherein neither candidate secured a majority of electoral votes, a special Electoral Commission was established. This incident illustrated profound flaws in the Electoral College system and led to calls for reform, seen later during pivotal elections.

The 1960s introduced the rise of calls for a direct popular vote after multiple attempts for change emerged throughout the 20th century. The most significant might be during the 1968 presidential election, catalyzed by shifts in public opinion that leaned heavily towards abolishment of the Electoral College in favor of a direct popular vote. However, the legislative fruition of these calls remained stagnant, mainly due to political and regional partisanship.

The skewed weight per vote due to demographic distribution across states has remained a pivotal issue. States like Wyoming having more electoral influence per capita compared to densely populated California reiterates disparities that frequently ignite discussions on the relevance and fairness of this system in modern elections.

Faithless electors have also occasionally influenced debates around the Electoral College's efficacy. In principle, electors are expected to vote for the candidate who received the most votes in their respective states, but instances of electors casting votes by either personal discretion or party influence have surfaced sporadically, leading to calls for tighter laws on elector commitments.

Current discussions also pivot on the effects of the Winner-Take-All method employed by most states, influencing strategic campaign placements, where candidates focus primarily on battleground states while often overlooking ones perceived as staunchly loyal to a particular party. This tactical disregard potentially undermines political engagement in "secure" states.

Alternative proposals to the existing format include the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, advanced as a way to ensure the Popular Vote winner becomes the President without amending the Constitution. Participating states agree to cast their electoral votes for the National Popular Vote winner as soon as enough states join to reach a 270-electoral vote majority.

The historical evolution and contemporary criticism of the Electoral College highlight fundamental concerns on its alignment with democratic principles, feeding an ongoing debate on whether it continues to serve its founding functions or whether a new method of presidential election is overdue for a contemporary America.

Mechanics of the Electoral College

On Election Day, voters across the United States cast their ballots not directly for presidential candidates but for electors who pledge to vote on their behalf in the Electoral College. These electors, whose numbers are tied to the sum of each state's Senators and Representatives in Congress, ultimately select the President and Vice President.

Following the state elections, chosen electors convene in their respective state capitals in December to officially cast their electoral votes. This process is a formality, as electors usually pledge to support their party's candidate if that candidate won the state's popular vote. Interestingly, while the U.S. Constitution dictates the existence of electors, it does not specify the exact proceedings for this voting, which has resulted in varied practices.

Each elector casts one vote for President and one for Vice President, which are recorded on separate ballots. This method of secret balloting aims to maintain elector discretion although 'faithless elector' occurrences are rare and have never impacted the end result of a presidential race.

After the voting by electors, the next crucial step is the counting and certification of electoral votes by Congress. This happens on January 6, following the election year, during a joint session of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Vice President, serving as the President of the Senate, oversees this significant event.

During this session, the certificates of electoral votes from each state are opened and presented in alphabetical order. Members of both chambers of Congress have the opportunity to object to the electoral votes. If both a Senator and a Representative challenge a state's results, the two chambers separately debate this issue. However, both houses of Congress must unanimously agree to reject an electoral vote—something that is highly rare.

Assuming no controversies demanding resolutions arise—or once resolved—the candidate who accumulates at least 270 electoral votes is officially declared the winner by the Vice President. This formal announcement ratifies the selection of the President-elect and Vice President-elect, with Inauguration Day set for January 20.

Controversies and Criticisms

The core controversies of the Electoral College often spark heated debate among scholars, policymakers, and the public alike. Central to these disagreements is the winner-takes-all allocation used by almost all states. Critics argue that this method often leaves the 'losing' voters in a state effectively unrepresented in the Electoral College. For example, a candidate can win a state by a small margin in the popular vote but garner all the state's electoral votes, potentially sidelining half the voting population. This can lead to a significant disparity between the national popular vote and the Electoral College results, raising questions about the democratic integrity of the election process.

Indeed, the divergence between the Electoral College and the popular vote has led to instances where the presidential candidate who lost the popular vote still claimed victory through the Electoral College. Examples in modern history include the 2000 and 2016 elections, in which George W. Bush and Donald Trump, respectively, lost the popular vote but won the presidency due to Electoral College mathematics. 1,2 Such situations have fueled arguments that the Electoral College may thwart the will of the majority of voters, leading to a government that lacks full democratic legitimacy by modern standards.

Adding another layer to these concerns are 'faithless electors.' These are electors who, contrary to expectations, do not vote for the candidate who won their state's popular vote. Although rare and yet to decisively impact the outcome of a presidential election, the very existence of faithless electors adds unpredictability to an already contentious system. It poses pivotal questions about electoral autonomy versus elector obligations, further complicating the debates around the Electoral College's role in democratic governance.

Additionally, concerns exist about the equal value of votes across different states. Because electoral votes are not strictly proportional to population, voters in less populated states wield comparatively more influence than those in densely populated states. This discrepancy can feel antithetical to principles of equal representation prevalent in democratic ideologies, where ideally each vote carries equal weight in influencing an election's outcome.

Therefore, despite the ingenious design and historical roots of the Electoral College within the U.S. Constitution, it raises significant concerns that threaten its current suitability. As such, calls for reform or replacement simmer within political discourse, propelled by these intricacies and contradictions that challenge its utility in ensuring a president who truly represents the majority's preference.

Proposed Reforms

One prominent reform initiative is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) , which posits a significant transformation in how electoral votes are allocated without necessitating a Constitutional amendment. Rather than abolishing the Electoral College, the NPVIC allows it to remain but works within its framework. States participating in the compact agree to award all their electoral votes to the presidential candidate who wins the nationwide popular vote, regardless of the state-specific results. This Compact will take effect only when the total electoral votes of the member states exceed the crucial figure of 270—enough to secure the election of the president. As of now, states representing 196 electoral votes have joined the compact, indicating movement toward but not yet reaching this critical threshold. 3

Another approach widely discussed involves amending the U.S. Constitution to abolish the Electoral College entirely, replacing it with a direct national popular vote. This method requires both a two-thirds majority vote in each house of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the state legislatures—which demonstrates a formidable challenge, given the political diversity and varying interests across states. This level of consensus is complex to achieve as demonstrated by history and reflects the very brand of federalist balance the founding fathers aimed to secure.

Both ideas, while robust in advocating for enhanced democracy, must confront enduring queries related to campaign dynamics, minority interests, and regional diversity. Critics of shifting to a straightforward national popular vote argue that such a shift may direct candidates to focus primarily on large urban centers where the densest populations reside, potentially neglecting rural or less densely-populated areas. Proponents reply that a national campaign strategy under the popular vote would compel presidential contenders to appeal to a broader cross-section of Americans, thereby promoting more inclusivity in policy discourse and campaigning.

As these proposals make clear, debate around the Electoral College's reform or abolition inherently addresses broader questions about the nature of American democracy and the fundamental principles governing it. The contemplation of these reforms—be it through constitutional amendments or innovative compacts—reveals an ongoing commitment to perfecting a union that remains true to both its historical roots and its evolving democratic ideals. This ongoing dialectic underscores that while the Founding Fathers laid forth a visionary template, it is incumbent upon subsequent generations to recalibrate its mechanisms to better reflect the values and demographics of a modern nation.

Impact on Political Campaigns

Political campaigns in the United States are fundamentally shaped by the Electoral College, explaining why presidential candidates concentrate their efforts on a select group of battleground or swing states rather than engaging equally across all states. This focus primarily results from the winner-takes-all method of allocating electoral votes, which is used by all but two states, Maine and Nebraska. Here, the candidate receiving the majority of the popular vote in a state typically secures all of that state's electoral votes.

This system compels strategists to invest a disproportionate amount of time, money, and resources into states that could go either way—Democratic or Republican. States like Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan often see a surge of campaign activity, including advertising spend, rallies, and targeted policies aimed at swaying an undecided electorate. Conversely, "safe" states with a history of swinging strongly Republican or Democrat receive considerably less attention beyond fundraising activities.

This tactical distribution of campaign resources has wider implications for political engagement across the country. It can lead to voter apathy in states considered safe, where the electorate may feel their vote holds less sway in tipping the balance of national results. By the same token, it can escalate election fervor in swing states, potentially giving a small pocket of voters an oversized influence on the outcome of the election.

Moreover, this strategy has spurred discussions about equity and representation in the democratic process. Critics argue that focusing only on swing states might lead to policy promises that cater to interests represented within these areas at the expense of broader national interests. This not only skews the democratic process but also places immense power in the hands of a few, thus making the national outcome dependent on regional issues and sentiments that might not mirror the overall will of the American populace.

Additionally, the Electoral College shapes campaign narratives in ways that deepen regional divides rather than fostering a cohesive national identity. Candidates may embrace rhetoric or adopt stances that resonate with key demographics within pivotal swing states, potentially inflaming partisan divides or overlooking urgent national issues that do not play as effectively in those areas.

In light of these issues, some critics argue for reforms that would lead presidential candidates to campaign for votes nationwide, respecting each vote equally irrespective of state identity. Such changes promise a campaign landscape that encourages candidates to build more inclusive platforms that address the concerns of a broader electorate.

Thus, while the Founding Fathers envisioned the Electoral College as a check against the unwielded voting population and as a balance between big and small states, its current manifestation continues to stir significant debate over its influence on American political and electoral strategies. Reflecting on these complex dynamics underscores the ongoing need to examine and possibly recalibrate election systems to ensure they accord with democratic principles of equality, representation, and fairness. These principles remain pivotal in making each citizen feel that their vote is not only counted but truly counts in shaping the governance of their country.

• Neale TH. The Electoral College: How It Works in Contemporary Presidential Elections. Congressional Research Service; 2020.
• Edwards GC III. Why the Electoral College Is Bad for America. 3rd ed. Yale University Press; 2019.
• Koza J, Fadem B, Grueskin M, et al. Every Vote Equal: A State-Based Plan for Electing the President by National Popular Vote. National Popular Vote Press; 2013.

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Why Was the Electoral College Created?

By: Dave Roos

Updated: December 14, 2020 | Original: July 15, 2019

Five times in history, presidential candidates have won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College . This has led some to question why Americans use this system to elect their presidents in the first place.

Among the many thorny questions debated by the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention , one of the hardest to resolve was how to elect the president. The Founding Fathers debated for months, with some arguing that Congress should pick the president and others insistent on a democratic popular vote.

Their compromise is known as the Electoral College.

What Is the Electoral College?

The system calls for the creation, every four years, of a temporary group of electors equal to the total number of representatives in Congress. Technically, it is these electors, and not the American people, who vote for the president. In modern elections, the first candidate to get 270 of the 538 total electoral votes wins the White House.

The Electoral College was never intended to be the “perfect” system for picking the president, says George Edwards III , emeritus political science professor at Texas A&M University.

“It wasn’t like the Founders said, ‘Hey, what a great idea! This is the preferred way to select the chief executive, period,’” says Edwards. “They were tired, impatient, frustrated. They cobbled together this plan because they couldn’t agree on anything else.”

Electoral College: A System Born of Compromise

At the time of the Philadelphia convention, no other country in the world directly elected its chief executive, so the delegates were wading into uncharted territory. Further complicating the task was a deep-rooted distrust of executive power. After all, the fledgling nation had just fought its way out from under a tyrannical king and overreaching colonial governors. They didn’t want another despot on their hands.

One group of delegates felt strongly that Congress shouldn’t have anything to do with picking the president. Too much opportunity for chummy corruption between the executive and legislative branches.

Another camp was dead set against letting the people elect the president by a straight popular vote. First, they thought 18th-century voters lacked the resources to be fully informed about the candidates, especially in rural outposts. Second, they feared a headstrong “democratic mob” steering the country astray. And third, a populist president appealing directly to the people could command dangerous amounts of power.

Out of those drawn-out debates came a compromise based on the idea of electoral intermediaries. These intermediaries wouldn’t be picked by Congress or elected by the people. Instead, the states would each appoint independent “electors” who would cast the actual ballots for the presidency.

Slavery and the Three-Fifths Compromise

But determining exactly how many electors to assign to each state was another sticking point. Here the divide was between slave-owning and non-slave-owning states. It was the same issue that plagued the distribution of seats in the House of Representatives: should or shouldn’t the Founders include slaves in counting a state’s population?

In 1787, roughly 40 percent of people living in the Southern states were enslaved Black people, who couldn’t vote. James Madison from Virginia—where enslaved people accounted for 60 percent of the population—knew that either a direct presidential election, or one with electors divvied up according to free white residents only, wouldn’t fly in the South.

“The right of suffrage was much more diffusive [i.e., extensive] in the Northern than the Southern States,” said Madison, “and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes.”

The result was the controversial “three-fifths compromise,” in which three-fifths of the enslaved Black population would be counted toward allocating representatives and electors and calculating federal taxes. The compromise ensured that Southern states would ratify the Constitution and gave Virginia, home to more than 200,000 slaves, a quarter (12) of the total electoral votes required to win the presidency (46).

Did you know? For 32 of the United States’ first 36 years, a slave-holding Virginian occupied the White House (John Adams from Massachusetts was the exception).

Not only was the creation of the Electoral College in part a political workaround for the persistence of slavery in the United States, but almost none of the Founding Fathers’ assumptions about the electoral system proved true.

For starters, there were no political parties in 1787. The drafters of the Constitution assumed that electors would vote according to their individual discretion, not the dictates of a state or national party. Today, most electors are bound to vote for their party’s candidate.

And even more important, the Constitution says nothing about how the states should allot their electoral votes. The assumption was that each elector’s vote would be counted. But over time, all but two states (Maine and Nebraska) passed laws to give all of their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the state’s popular vote count. Any semblance of elector independence has been fully wiped out.

The Founders also assumed that most elections would ultimately be decided by neither the people nor the electors, but by the House of Representatives. According to the Constitution, if no single candidate wins a majority of the electoral votes, the decision goes to the House, where each state gets one vote.

After the unanimous election of George Washington as the nation’s first president, the Founders figured that consequent elections would feature tons of candidates who would divide up the electoral pie into tiny chunks, giving Congress a chance to pick the winner. But as soon as national political parties formed, the number of presidential candidates shrank. Only two U.S. elections have been decided by the House and the last one was in 1824.

Why We Still Use the Electoral College

So why does the Electoral College still exist, despite its contentious origins and awkward fit with modern politics? The party in power typically benefits from the existence of the Electoral College, says Edwards, and the minority party has little chance of changing the system because a constitutional amendment requires a two-thirds supermajority in Congress plus ratification by three-fourths of the states. 

Columnist George Will shudders to think of what would have happened in the 1960 election if there had been no Electoral College.

“ John F. Kennedy ’s popular vote margin over Richard M. Nixon was just 118,574,” writes Will. “If all 68,838,219 popular votes had been poured into a single national bucket, there would have been powerful incentives to challenge the results in many of the nation’s 170,000 precincts.”

How the Great Compromise and the Electoral College Affect Politics Today

Larger states wanted congressional representation based on population, while smaller states wanted equal representation. They met in the middle.

5 Presidents Who Lost the Popular Vote But Won the Election

These presidential candidates didn't need to secure more popular votes to win election, due to the Electoral College.

How the Electoral College Was Nearly Abolished in 1970

The House approved a constitutional amendment to dismantle the indirect voting system, but it was killed in the Senate by a filibuster.

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Lesson of the Day: How Does the Electoral College Work and Why Does It Matter?

In this lesson, students will learn about the Electoral College — how it works in a presidential election and why it was created — and consider whether it needs to be reformed.

By Jeremy Engle and Michael Gonchar

This Lesson of the Day and a related Student Opinion question will prepare students to participate in our live panel discussion about the Electoral College, on Oct. 22 at 1 p.m. Eastern. Learn more here.

Lesson Overview

Featured Article: “ How Does the Electoral College Work and Why Does It Matter? ” by Allyson Waller

“It remains one of the most surprising facts about voting in the United States: While the popular vote elects members of Congress, mayors, governors, state legislators and even more obscure local officials, it does not determine the winner of the presidency , the highest office in the land,” the featured article begins.

In this lesson, you will learn about the Electoral College — how it works, why it was created and why it is receiving so much scrutiny now. In a Going Further activity, you will explore the question of whether the Electoral College should be reformed.

1. What do you know about the Electoral College? What is its purpose? How does it work? Do you have any feelings about it, one way or another?

Look at the interactive diagram in “ The Battleground States Biden and Trump Need to Win 270. ” You can build your own coalition of states to see how either candidate, President Trump or former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., might win the 2020 election .

Spend some time moving states into the Biden and Trump circles and then respond to these prompts:

What do you notice?

What do you wonder? What questions does it raise?

What story does the interactive tell? Write a catchy headline that captures its main idea. If your headline makes a claim, tell us what you noticed that supports your claim.

Does this interactive change how you feel about the Electoral College? Why?

Questions for Writing and Discussion

Read the featured article , then answer the following questions:

1. Why does having an Electoral College that determines the winner of a presidential election, rather than a popular vote, lead to “an intense focus on key battleground states,” according to Ms. Waller?

2. How many electoral votes are needed to win? What happens if there is a tie in the Electoral College? How often has it happened in the past, and how was the deadlock broken?

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Electoral College , the system by which the president and vice president of the United States are chosen. It was devised by the framers of the United States Constitution to provide a method of election that was feasible , desirable, and consistent with a republican form of government. For the results of U.S. presidential elections, see the table .

During most of the Constitutional Convention , presidential selection was vested in the legislature. The Electoral College was proposed near the end of the convention by the Committee on Unfinished Parts, chaired by David Brearley of New Jersey , to provide a system that would select the most qualified president and vice president. Historians have suggested a variety of reasons for the adoption of the Electoral College, including concerns about the separation of powers and the relationship between the executive and legislative branches, the balance between small and large states, slavery , and the perceived dangers of direct democracy . One supporter of the Electoral College, Alexander Hamilton , argued that while it might not be perfect, it was “at least excellent.”

Article II, Section 1, of the Constitution stipulated that states could select electors in any manner they desired and in a number equal to their congressional representation (senators plus representatives). (The Twenty-Third Amendment , adopted in 1961, provided Electoral College representation for Washington, D.C. ) The electors would then meet and vote for two people, at least one of whom could not be an inhabitant of their state. Under the original plan, the person receiving the largest number of votes, provided it was a majority of the number of electors, would be elected president, and the person with the second largest number of votes would become vice president. If no one received a majority, the presidency of the United States would be decided by the House of Representatives , voting by states and choosing from among the top five candidates in the electoral vote. A tie for vice president would be broken by the Senate . Despite the Convention’s rejection of a direct popular vote as unwise and unworkable, the initial public reaction to the Electoral College system was favorable. The major issue of concern regarding the presidency during the debate over ratification of the Constitution was not the method of selection but the president’s unlimited eligibility for reelection.

The development of national political parties toward the end of the 18th century provided the new system with its first major challenge. Informal congressional caucuses , organized along party lines, selected presidential nominees. Electors, chosen by state legislatures mostly on the basis of partisan inclination, were not expected to exercise independent judgment when voting. So strong were partisan loyalties in 1800 that all the Democratic-Republican electors voted for their party’s candidates, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr . Since the framers had not anticipated party-line voting and there was no mechanism for indicating a separate choice for president and vice president, the tie had to be broken by the Federalist -controlled House of Representatives. The election of Jefferson after 36 ballots led to the adoption of the Twelfth Amendment in 1804, which specified separate ballots for president and vice president and reduced the number of candidates from which the House could choose from five to three.

The development of political parties coincided with the expansion of popular choice. By 1836 all states selected their electors by direct popular vote except South Carolina , which did so only after the American Civil War . In choosing electors, most states adopted a general-ticket system in which slates of partisan electors were selected on the basis of a statewide vote. Thus, the winner of a state’s popular vote would win its entire electoral vote. Only Maine and Nebraska have chosen to deviate from this method, instead allocating electoral votes to the victor in each House district and a two-electoral-vote bonus to the statewide winner. The winner-take-all system generally favored major parties over minor parties, large states over small states, and cohesive voting groups concentrated in large states over those that were more diffusely dispersed across the country.

One of the most troubling aspects of the Electoral College system is the possibility that the winner might not be the candidate with the most popular votes. Four presidents— Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, George W. Bush in 2000, and Donald Trump in 2016—were elected with fewer popular votes than their opponents, and Andrew Jackson lost to John Quincy Adams in the House of Representatives after winning a plurality of the popular and electoral vote in 1824. In 18 elections between 1824 and 2000, presidents were elected without popular majorities—including Abraham Lincoln , who won election in 1860 with under 40 percent of the national vote. During much of the 20th century, however, the effect of the general ticket system was to exaggerate the popular vote, not reverse it. For example, in 1980 Ronald Reagan won just over 50 percent of the popular vote and 91 percent of the electoral vote; in 1988 George Bush received 53 percent of the popular vote and 79 percent of the electoral vote; and in 1992 and 1996 William J. Clinton won 43 and 49 percent of the popular vote, respectively, and 69 and 70 percent of the electoral vote. Third-party candidates with broad national support are generally penalized in the Electoral College—as was Ross Perot , who won 19 percent of the popular vote in 1992 and no electoral votes—though candidates with geographically concentrated support—such as Dixiecrat candidate Strom Thurmond , who won 39 electoral votes in 1948 with just over 2 percent of the national vote—are occasionally able to win electoral votes.

The divergence between popular and electoral votes indicates some of the principal advantages and disadvantages of the Electoral College system. Many who favor the system maintain that it provides presidents with a special federative majority and a broad national mandate for governing, unifying the two major parties across the country and requiring broad geographic support to win the presidency. In addition, they argue that the Electoral College protects the interests of small states and sparsely populated areas, which they claim would be ignored if the president was directly elected. Opponents, however, argue that the potential for an undemocratic outcome—in which the winner of the popular vote loses the electoral vote—the bias against third parties and independent candidates, the disincentive for voter turnout in states where one of the parties is clearly dominant, and the possibility of a “faithless” elector who votes for a candidate other than the one to whom he is pledged make the Electoral College outmoded and undesirable. Many opponents advocate eliminating the Electoral College altogether and replacing it with a direct popular vote. Their position has been buttressed by public opinion polls, which regularly show that Americans prefer a popular vote to the Electoral College system. Other possible reforms include a district plan, similar to those used in Maine and Nebraska, which would allocate electoral votes by legislative district rather than at the statewide level; and a proportional plan, which would assign electoral votes on the basis of the percentage of popular votes a candidate received. Supporters of the Electoral College contend that its longevity has proven its merit and that previous attempts to reform the system have been unsuccessful.

In 2000 George W. Bush ’s narrow 271–266 Electoral College victory over Al Gore , who won the nationwide popular vote by more than 500,000 votes, prompted renewed calls for the abolition of the Electoral College, as did Donald Trump ’s 304–227 Electoral College victory in 2016 over Hillary Clinton , who won the nationwide popular vote by nearly three million votes. Doing so, however, would require adopting a constitutional amendment by a two-thirds vote of both chambers of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states. Because many smaller states fear that eliminating the Electoral College would reduce their electoral influence, adoption of such an amendment is considered difficult and unlikely.

Some advocates of reform, recognizing the enormous constitutional hurdle, instead focused their efforts on passing a so-called National Popular Vote (NPV) bill through state legislatures. State legislatures that enacted the NPV would agree that their state’s electoral votes would be cast for the winner of the national popular vote—even if that person was not the winner of the state’s popular vote; language in the bill stipulated that it would not take effect until the NPV was passed by states possessing enough electoral votes to determine the winner of the presidential election. By 2010 several states—including Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New Jersey—had adopted the NPV, and it had been passed in at least one legislative house in more than a dozen other states.

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The Electoral College decides who will be elected president and vice president of the U.S. Learn who is involved and how the process works.

What is the Electoral College?

The Electoral College is not a physical place. It is a process which includes the:

• Selection of electors
• Meeting of electors who cast votes for the president and vice president
• Counting of the electors’ votes by Congress

In other U.S. elections, candidates are elected directly by popular vote. But the president and vice president are not elected directly by citizens. Instead, they are chosen through the Electoral College process.

Who is in the Electoral College?

Each state gets as many electors as it has members of Congress (House and Senate). Including Washington, D.C.’s three electors, there are currently 538 electors in all. Find out how many electoral votes each state gets.

Each state’s political parties choose their own slate of potential electors. Who is chosen to be an elector, how, and when varies by state. Learn more about how electors are chosen.

How does the Electoral College process work?

After you cast your ballot for president, your vote goes to a statewide tally. In 48 states and Washington, D.C., the winner gets all the electoral votes for that state. Maine and Nebraska assign their electors using a proportional system.

A candidate needs the vote of at least 270 electors—more than half of all electors—to win the presidential election.

In most cases, a projected winner is announced on election night in November after you vote. But the actual Electoral College vote takes place in mid-December when the electors meet in their states. See the Electoral College timeline of events for the 2020 election.

While the Constitution does not require electors to vote for the candidate chosen by their state's popular vote, some states do. The rare elector who votes for someone else may be fined, disqualified, and replaced by a substitute elector. Or they may even be prosecuted by their state.

Learn more about how the Electoral College works.

Unusual Electoral College scenarios

Winning the popular vote but losing the election.

It is possible to win the Electoral College but lose the popular vote . This happened in 2016, 2000, and three times in the 1800s.

What happens if no candidate wins the majority of electoral votes?

If no candidate receives the majority of electoral votes,  the vote goes to the House of Representatives .

This has happened twice. The first time was following the 1800 presidential election when the House chose Thomas Jefferson. And following the 1824 presidential election, the House selected John Quincy Adams as president.

How to change the Electoral College

The Electoral College process is in the U.S. Constitution. It would take a constitutional amendment to change the process. For more information, contact your U.S. senator or your U.S. representative .

LAST UPDATED: August 22, 2024

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