What is the Electoral College?

As counting of ballots in the presidential election dragged on this month, many followers of U.S. politics have revisited a question that has often been asked since the 2000 and 2016 elections: Why has our Electoral College system once again left the choices of a few hundred thousand voters in a half-dozen states in charge of determining a president for 328 million Americans?

As of this writing, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. and running mate Senator Kamala D. Harris have racked up over 5.6 million more votes across the country than the Trump-Pence ticket and are on track to a 306-232 win in the Electoral College. But had just a few tens of thousands of votes swung the other way in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, the result could have been a narrow re-election for the president and the third time since 2000 that the loser of the popular vote count nevertheless got elected president.

What is the Electoral College?

The Electoral College refers to the group of "electors" designated by the Constitution to be chosen by state governments to elect the president and vice president of the United States. The concept came to fruition during the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia in 1787, during which a couple of committees were established to decide how to elect the president of the newly formed United States of America.

During the course of the convention, the country's founders considered three approaches: selection of a president by the Congress, selection of a president by the legislatures of the states, and a "popular" election, which at that time would have been restricted to only white, land-owning male citizens. James Wilson, a delegate from Pennsylvania, called the challenge of getting 13 states' delegates to agree on how to choose the president "in truth, one of the most difficult of all we have to decide."

The committee that ultimately put together the final proposal was called the committee for "Unfinished Portions", which responded to support for a separation of powers by creating the electoral college system rather than have the national legislature elect the president (source). Because they were heavily outnumbered population-wise, southern states objected to any form of direct popular vote. After compromises creating a House of Representatives apportioned by population and a Senate with two senators from each state, the founders agreed to a hybrid plan for electing the president: each state would get a number of "electoral votes" equal to the sum of its representatives in Congress plus two Senators, with three-fifths of the number of enslaved persons counted for the purposes of House representation. The candidate winning the most electoral votes would become president. With an Electoral College of 538 electors today, candidates must win at least 270 electoral votes to be elected president and vice president.

What are the arguments for and against the existence of the Electoral College?

Arguments for retaining and abolishing the Electoral College have waxed and waned ever since the Constitution was ratified. After just 16 years, in fact, Congress enacted the 12th Amendment,
changing the original Electoral College process to clarify that electoral votes would be cast separately for president and vice president rather than the initial system under which the candidate placing second became vice president, leading to political opponents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams serving atop the same administration and other political challenges.
While far from exhaustive, this list tries to capture some of the principal arguments for and against the Electoral College:

For: The most commonly proposed alternative to the Electoral College, a national popular vote, could result in an administrative nightmare if the popular vote were as close nationally as it was this year in individual states like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. A direct nationwide popular vote could also create an incentive to maximize the votes and turnout in the most partisan states, including potentially through fraud in states where one party controls the governor's office, chief elections office, and the legislature with no effective oversight. Diffusing responsibility for the presidential election among 50 states and D.C. acts as a check against election fraud.

For: During times of rapid social or cultural change, the Electoral College system allows political upheaval in the country to cool down and creates time and space for melding the desire for social change with continuity in government. This protects some level of national consensus on policies and institutions. Instead of parliamentary elections that abruptly sweep one party out of power and another in, the Electoral College, along with elections of representatives every two years and senators on a rolling six-year cycle, makes political change gradual.

For: In its current form, the Electoral College continues, more or less, to address one of the founders' principal concerns: ensuring that the person elected president has won support from states throughout the country, rather than just from one region or by running up millions of votes in the most partisan enclaves. The Electoral College reflects the Constitution's creation of not a pure "democracy" but a federal republic of 50 states.

Against: The country's current polarization, with some 40 states all but guaranteed to go Democratic or Republican in presidential elections, allows presidential candidates to ignore much of the country and focus their resources on a handful of "swing" states. Voters in big "blue" states like California and New York or reliably "red" states in the south and midwest get virtually no attention during the general election while voters in smaller "purple" states like Arizona and Nevada are lavished with candidates' attention and campaigning.

Against: Opponents argue the Electoral College does that "cooling down" job all too well and shuts out third-party or independent candidates with its winner-take-all outcomes and the challenge an independent candidate faces to get on 50 state ballots.

Against: By requiring that every state gets at least three electoral votes, voters in lower-population states like Alaska, the Dakotas, Delaware, Vermont, and Wyoming get effectively far more political influence per vote than residents of big states like California, Florida, and Texas.
Against: Critics argue that the Electoral College system is less democratic than a national direct popular vote and violates the "one person, one vote" principle because a candidate who does not win a majority of votes nationwide can nonetheless win a majority of Electoral College votes as occurred most recently in 2000 and 2016.

Previous Efforts to Abolish the Electoral College

Since 1800, more than 700 proposals to reform or eliminate the system have been introduced in Congress. Three approaches that have gained the most attention and support are outlined below.

Celler Amendment

In the presidential election of 1968, Republican Richard Nixon won just 511,000 more votes than Democrat Hubert Humphrey, a margin equal to less than 1 percent of the nationwide total, but rolled up 56 percent of the electoral votes to Hubert Humphrey's 35.5 percent and George Wallace's 8.5 percent. After that election, Representative Emanuel Celler, a New York Democrat and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, proposed a constitutional amendment to replace the Electoral College with a system based on the national popular vote. The House ultimately approved it in September 1969 by a large, bipartisan majority of 339-70. In the Senate, however, the measure was filibustered by both Democratic and Republican senators in southern and smaller states on the grounds that abolishing the Electoral College would reduce their states' political influence, and the proposed amendment ultimately died (source). The House vote remains the closest the United States has come to abolishing the Electoral College.

Carter/Bayh Proposals

In 1977, President Jimmy Carter, who narrowly defeated Gerald Ford 297-240, wrote a letter to Congress arguing for the abolishment of the Electoral College. His letter included the arguments that "Under the Electoral College, it is always possible that the winner of the popular vote will not be elected," and that "In the last election, the result could have been changed by a small shift of votes in Ohio and Hawaii, despite a popular vote difference of 1.7 million." Two years later, Senator Birch Bayh, an Indiana Democrat who was also the driving force behind the Celler amendment in 1969, introduced a proposal to replace the Electoral College with a direct national election, saying: "We've been close to having electoral winners who were popular vote losers. There are those who say if the system isn't broken, don't fix it. That's like saying the house isn't on fire, so I don't need fire insurance." Bayh's plan was narrowly defeated in the Senate on a 51-48 vote, leading the House to drop action on its version of Bayh's proposal.

National Popular Vote Interstate Compact

In response to prior congressional failures to replace the Electoral College, advocates in 2006 launched a plan to replace it by action at the state level. As of this year, 15 states and the District of Columbia, which combined have a total of 196 electoral votes, have joined the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, under which they pledge to award their state electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. Once states with at least 74 more electoral votes join the compact, and its legality is confirmed, the compact would effectively replace the Electoral College by ensuring that only the winner of the nationwide popular vote also secures an Electoral College win. The compact is based on a section of the Constitution (Article II, Section 1, Clause 2) that gives state legislators the power to determine the manner in which their state chooses electors. Some political scholars have suggested that the Constitution may require Congress to vote to make the compact enforceable. It also appears likely to face legal challenges, although the Supreme Court did reaffirm generally the power of states to determine how they choose their electors in rulings this past July in Chiafalo v. Washington and Colorado Department of State v. Baca. In unanimous rulings, the Court affirmed that those states may prohibit "faithless electors" from casting a ballot for someone other than the winner of the presidential vote in their state.

Additional Resources:

Want to know more about the Electoral College? Here are resources from the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate that can help you learn more about the role and history of the Electoral College, and the arguments for and against keeping the Electoral College system of voting.

• This month, the Kennedy Institute's Today's Vote program is focused on Senate Joint Resolution 17, which would abolish the Electoral College and replace it with the direct election of the president and vice president by popular vote. Learn more about participating in Today's Vote here.
• Learn more about the Great Compromise through our Experiencing Exhibits video
• Watch a recent Getting to the Point of Elections in Massachusetts to hear from Massachusetts State Senator Barry Finegold and State Representative John Lawn about the preservation and expansion of voting in future primary and general elections.