essay on the electoral college

It’s time to abolish the Electoral College

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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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The Reason for the Electoral College

By Joe Miller

Posted on February 11, 2008

Q: Why does the U.S. have an Electoral College?

A: The framers of the Constitution didn’t trust direct democracy.

FULL QUESTION:

Why does the United States have an Electoral College when it would be so easy to directly elect a president, as we do for all the other political offices?

FULL ANSWER:

When U.S. citizens go to the polls to “elect” a president, they are in fact voting for a particular slate of electors. In every state but Maine and Nebraska , the candidate who wins the most votes (that is, a plurality) in the state receives all of the state’s electoral votes. The number of electors in each state is the sum of its U.S. senators and its U.S. representatives. (The District of Columbia has three electoral votes, which is the number of senators and representatives it would have if it were permitted representation in Congress.) The electors meet in their respective states 41 days after the popular election. There, they cast a ballot for president and a second for vice president. A candidate must receive a majority of electoral votes to be elected president.

The reason that the Constitution calls for this extra layer, rather than just providing for the direct election of the president, is that most of the nation’s founders were actually rather afraid of democracy. James Madison worried about what he called “factions,” which he defined as groups of citizens who have a common interest in some proposal that would either violate the rights of other citizens or would harm the nation as a whole. Madison’s fear – which Alexis de Tocqueville later dubbed “the tyranny of the majority” – was that a faction could grow to encompass more than 50 percent of the population, at which point it could “sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens.” Madison has a solution for tyranny of the majority: “A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking.”

As Alexander Hamilton writes in “The Federalist Papers,” the Constitution is designed to ensure “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.” The point of the Electoral College is to preserve “the sense of the people,” while at the same time ensuring that a president is chosen “by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice.”

In modern practice, the Electoral College is mostly a formality. Most electors are loyal members of the party that has selected them, and in 26 states, plus Washington, D.C., electors are bound by laws or party pledges to vote in accord with the popular vote. Although an elector could, in principle, change his or her vote (and a few actually have over the years), doing so is rare.

As the 2000 election reminded us, the Electoral College does make it possible for a candidate to win the popular vote and still not become president. But that is less a product of the Electoral College and more a product of the way states apportion electors. In every state but Maine and Nebraska, electors are awarded on a winner-take-all basis. So if a candidate wins a state by even a narrow margin, he or she wins all of the state’s electoral votes. The winner-take-all system is not federally mandated; states are free to allocate their electoral votes as they wish.

The Electoral College was not the only Constitutional limitation on direct democracy, though we have discarded most of those limitations. Senators were initially to be appointed by state legislatures, and states were permitted to ban women from voting entirely. Slaves got an even worse deal, as a slave officially was counted as just three-fifths of a person. The 14th Amendment abolished the three-fifths rule and granted (male) former slaves the right to vote. The 17th Amendment made senators subject to direct election, and the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote.

– Joe Miller

Hamilton, Alexander. “ Federalist No. 68 .” The Federalist Papers [1788]. Accessed at The Library of Congress Web site. 28 Jan. 2008.

Madison, James. “ Federalist No. 10 .” The Federalist Papers [1787]. Accessed at The Library of Congress Web site. 28 Jan. 2008.

de Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America , vol. 1. Accessed at the University of Virginia Department of American Studies Web site. 28 Jan. 2008.

Office of the Federal Register, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration Web site, FAQ , 11 Feb. 2008.

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.

number 60 • Summer 2024

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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. 

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An unseen problem with the Electoral College – it tells bad guys where to target their efforts

Professor of Political Science and Director of the Elections Research Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Barry C. Burden does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Over the past four years, Congress and state governments have worked hard to prevent the aftermath of the 2024 election from descending into the chaos and threats to democracy that occurred around the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

A new federal law cleaned up ambiguities that could allow for election subversion . New state laws have been enacted across the country to protect election workers from threats and harassment. Technology experts are working to confront misinformation campaigns and vulnerabilities in election systems.

But untouched in all of these improvements is the underlying structure of presidential elections – the Electoral College .

Here is a quick refresher about how the system works today:

After citizens vote in the presidential election in November, the Constitution assigns the task of choosing the president and vice president to electors . Electors are allocated based on the number of congressional representatives and senators from each state. The electors meet in their separate state capitals in December to cast their votes. The ballots are then counted by the vice president in front of members of Congress on Jan. 6 to determine which ticket has won a majority.

The widely varied pros and cons of the Electoral College have already been aired and debated extensively. But there is another problem that few have recognized: The Electoral College makes American democracy more vulnerable to people with malicious intent.

A state-centric system

The original brilliance of the Electoral College has become one of its prime weaknesses. The unusual system was devised at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 as a compromise that prioritized the representation of state interests . This focus helped win over reluctant delegates who feared that the most populous states would disregard small states’ concerns.

Nowadays nearly every state has chosen to award all of its electoral votes to whichever ticket wins more votes in the state. Even if a candidate gets 51% of the popular vote, use of the winner-take-all rule in these states means they will be awarded 100% of the electoral votes.

This is what leads to the “battleground state” phenomenon: Presidential candidates focus their rallies, advertisements and outreach efforts on the few states where campaigns could actually tip the balance. In 2020, 77% of all campaign ads ran in just six states that were home to only 21% of the nation’s population.

In this way, the Electoral College system naturally draws campaign attention to issues that might tip the balance in these hotbeds of competitiveness.

A road map for bad behavior

By doing so, the system essentially identifies the states where malicious people who want to alter or undermine the election results should focus their energies. The handful of battleground states are efficient targets for harmful efforts that would otherwise not have much success meddling in elections.

Someone who wants to infiltrate the election system would have difficulty causing problems in a national popular vote because it is decided by thousands of disconnected local jurisdictions . In contrast, the Electoral College makes it convenient to sow mischief by only meddling in a few states widely seen as decisive.

In 2020, the lawsuits, hacking, alternative electors, recount efforts and other challenges did not target states perceived by some to have weaker security because they had less strict voter ID laws or voter signature requirements. Opponents of the results also did not go after states such as California and Texas that account for a large share of the country’s voters.

Rather, all of the firepower was trained on about a half-dozen swing states. By one account, there were 82 lawsuits filed in the days after the 2020 presidential election , 77 of which targeted six swing states. The “fake elector” schemes in which supporters of Donald Trump put forward unofficial lists of electors occurred in only seven battleground states.

The popular vote alternative

A majority of Americans say in surveys they prefer to scrap the Electoral College system and simply award the presidency to the person who gets the most votes nationwide.

Dumping the Electoral College would have a variety of consequences, but it would immediately remove opportunities for disrupting elections via battleground states. A close election in Arizona or Pennsylvania would no longer provide leverage for upending the national result.

Any election system that does not rely on states as the puzzle pieces for deciding elections would remove opportunities like these. It could also seriously reduce disputes over recounts and suspicion about late-night ballot counts, long lines and malfunctioning voting machines because those local concerns would be swamped by the national vote totals.

Although not without its own concerns , an agreement among the states to award their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote is probably the most viable method for shifting to the popular vote, in part because it does not require passing an amendment to the Constitution .

There is no ideal way to run a presidential election. The Electoral College has survived in its current form for almost two centuries, a remarkable run for democracy. But in an era where intense scrutiny of just a few states is the norm, the system also lights the way for those who would harm democracy.

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The History of the Electoral College Debate

By: Sarah Pruitt

Updated: October 23, 2020 | Original: December 13, 2016

At the time of the Constitutional Convention , the majority of the new nation’s citizens lived in cities like Philadelphia or Boston, while the Southern states were more rural and sparsely populated. African American enslaved people made up a full 40 percent of the South’s population, and Southern delegates wanted them to be counted along with white citizens when it came to calculating how many representatives their states would receive in Congress. Northerners, on the other hand, argued that slaves were property, and didn’t require representation.

This ugly debate was resolved with the so-called “three-fifths compromise,” by which each Black person would count as three-fifths of a person when determining congressional representation for each state by population. As each state’s number of electors in the Electoral College was equal to its number of representatives in Congress, this compromise also affected how the country elected its executive branch.

READ MORE: What Is the Electoral College and Why Was It Created?

The framers put a great deal of thought into establishing the Electoral College, but were still uncertain exactly how it would work in practice. The first serious problem emerged in the election of 1800, when Thomas Jefferson, the Democratic-Republican candidate for president received the same number of electoral votes as his chosen running mate, Aaron Burr. 

The election went to the House of Representatives, dominated by the rival Federalist Party; some of the party’s members saw Burr as less objectionable than Jefferson, and wanted him to become president. After a chaotic process , including no fewer than 36 votes, Jefferson was elected president and Burr V.P. The whole debacle led to the adoption of the 12th Amendment, which mandated that electors specify their choices for president and vice president.

Despite that crucial improvement to the Electoral System, there was still a major issue looming: What if the winner of the popular vote, the candidate chosen by the majority of the nation’s citizens, failed to win the Electoral College, and didn’t become president? This happened for the first time in 1824, to Andrew Jackson , who had risen from the backwoods of the Carolinas, with little formal education, to become a successful slaveholding lawyer in Tennessee and the celebrated hero of the War of 1812.

READ MORE: 5 Presidents Who Lost the Popular Vote But Won the Election

All four leading candidates in the 1824 election were from the same party, the Democratic-Republicans. Though Jackson got the most electoral votes (99) and held a slight lead (38,149 votes) in the popular vote, no candidate received a majority in the Electoral College, and the decision again fell to the House of Representatives, who would decide between the top three finishers, Jackson, John Quincy Adams (who received 84 electoral votes) and Secretary of State William Crawford.

Speaker of the House Henry Clay , who had come in fourth in the presidential race and hated Jackson, suddenly had tremendous influence over the election results. The Kentuckian forged an alliance between electors in Ohio and New England (including states that had voted decisively for Jackson) in order to hand the White House to Adams, who later appointed Clay as his secretary of state. 

The so-called “corrupt bargain” haunted Adams’ presidency and allowed Jackson to effectively market himself as the common man’s champion against an elitist, corrupt system. “Old Hickory” won the White House in 1828, and in his first annual message to Congress he recommended eliminating the Electoral College.

Since then, four other U.S. presidential elections (1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016) have ended with a candidate winning the Electoral College but losing the popular vote. This apparent disconnect between the democratic ideal of the people playing a direct role in government and the reality of the system in practice has fueled the continuing debate over the Electoral College, and led many people over the years to echo Jackson’s call to abolish it.

READ MORE: How Are Electoral College Electors Chosen?

Critics of the Electoral College system call it a relic of the 18th century—when only three-fifths of a black person was counted, and black men, women and white men who didn’t own property couldn’t vote—and argue that it doesn’t fairly represent our nation as it exists today. In recent elections, national campaigns have increasingly focused on a small handful of “battleground” states whose electoral votes are up for grabs, effectively depriving millions of citizens (as many as four out of every five Americans , according to some analysts) of their voice in the electoral process.

Another potential weakness in the Electoral College system is the existence of so-called “faithless electors,” who for whatever reason choose to vote against their state’s chosen candidate. There have been 157 such faithless electors over the years, starting way back in 1796, when a Pennsylvania elector changed his vote from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson , for reasons that remain unclear. Today, many states require electors to take a formal pledge to uphold their state’s choice, but 21 states have no such requirement.

On the other hand, supporters of the Electoral College see it as an integral part of our federal union, and a necessary way to give the states, as well as the people, a role in choosing the leadership of the government. Now, as in 1787, it’s seen as a critical way of preventing large urban centers from dominating the political process at the expense of rural areas. 

READ MORE: How the Great Compromise Affects Politics Today

In any case, eliminating the Electoral College would not be an easy process. Congress, or a national constitutional convention, would have to propose an amendment, which would then have to be ratified by either three-quarters of state legislatures (currently 38) or by state ratifying conventions in three-quarters of the states.

Those who argue in favor of the current system can point to the fact that in more than 200 years, the electoral and popular votes have split just five times (nearly 10 percent of presidential elections), and faithless electors have never changed the result of an election. Given that statistic, perhaps many would agree with Alexander Hamilton , who in No. 68 of the Federalist Papers  wrote of the new Electoral College system that “if the manner of it be not perfect, it is at least excellent.”

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The Electoral College

The Oxford Handbook of American Election Law, Forthcoming

U of Penn Law School, Public Law Research Paper No. 24-42

Posted: 13 Aug 2024

Katherine Shaw

University of Pennsylvania - Carey Law School; Yeshiva University - Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law

Date Written: July 24, 2024

This chapter considers a profoundly anomalous feature of American democracy: our system of presidential selection. From very early on in the country’s history, the Constitution’s system for presidential selection proved flawed in ways both large and small. Those flaws have only become more conspicuous, and more pressing, with the passage of time. Today, the complex system, part constitutional and part statutory, that we refer to collectively as the “Electoral College,” has not only repeatedly misaligned popular will and presidential selection, but has exacerbated polarization, distortion, and dysfunction, both in presidential elections and in our politics more broadly. In recent years the College has also shown itself dangerously susceptible to manipulation and abuse. For these reasons, addressing the deficiencies in the Electoral College should be high on any agenda that takes seriously the imperative of democratic reform. The chapter begins by tracing the origins of the Electoral College. It then briefly compares the Electoral College to other mechanisms for selecting chief executive officers, both abroad and in the American states. It next surveys the College’s key shortcomings today, both conceptual and practical, concluding that the College, far from serving any genuine democratic purpose, is flatly antidemocratic, a corrosive force in our politics, and dangerously vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. The chapter ends by considering prospects for reform, examining both historical efforts to change or abolish the College, and the efforts underway today.

Keywords: Electoral College, president, presidential election, constitutional amendment, interstate compact, Constitution, politics

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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
• Reasons to Keep the Electoral College
• Electoral Votes by State in 2020
• The National Popular Vote Plan
• What Happens If the Presidential Election Is a Tie
• Representative Democracy: Definition, Pros, and Cons
• Direct Democracy: Definition, Examples, Pros and Cons
• What Is a Bicameral Legislature and Why Does the U.S. Have One?
• What Is Incrementalism in Government? Definition and Examples
• What Was the US Second Party System? History and Significance
• What Are Low Information Voters?
• About the Speaker of the House of Representatives
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• Apportionment and the US Census
• The Important Role of US Third Parties
• Congressional Oversight and the US Government

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly about The Electoral College

A history professor shares his insights on the governmental institution that has increasingly become the deciding factor in American presidential races.

The 2020 presidential election is fast approaching, which means it’s the perfect time for a refresher on the governmental institution that has increasingly become the deciding factor in American presidential races: the Electoral College. We asked Chris DeRosa, Ph.D., chair of the Department of History and Anthropology, to share his insights on the institution.

THE PURPOSE

The original plan called for each elector to cast two votes for president. Whoever received a majority of votes from electors became president; the runner-up became vice president.

States can do what they want with their electoral votes, says DeRosa. Most give them to the candidate who wins a state majority. An elector who defies that assignment is called a faithless elector, and the state has the choice whether to tolerate them. “You don’t get them very often because they’re chosen as party loyalists, and we’ve never had faithless electors swing an election,” says DeRosa.

One of the advantages is the end result is clear: “Somebody wins; somebody gets a majority of the electoral votes,” says DeRosa. If presidents were elected purely by popular vote, a candidate could win the presidency with less than 50% of the vote. “If you had more than two parties contending for the presidency, you might have somebody winning with 30% of the votes, and that’s a ticket to an extremist candidate.”

The first problem with the Electoral College is that it gives more weight to voters in small states than those in more populous ones, says DeRosa. Every state gets a minimum of three electoral votes. However, each state’s total allotment is based on its representation in the Senate (always two people) and the House (varies by population). “So take Washington, D.C., as an example,” says DeRosa. “More people live in D.C. than in Wyoming, the least populous state in the union; but they both get three electoral votes.” (Plus, unlike Wyoming, D.C. gets no voting representation in Congress.)

The biggest problem with the Electoral College is that it encourages vote suppression, says DeRosa. Southern states always had an advantage in the population count, because they got electoral votes appointed on the basis of their slave populations and their white populations. That gave the states extra representation for people they weren’t really representing at all.

After the Civil War, former slaves were counted as “whole” persons, not three-fifths of one, for purposes of electoral vote allotment. But Black voter suppression still took place through Jim Crow laws. This further “inflated the electoral count of people who were not representing all the people in their state,” says DeRosa. “So the Electoral College became a pillar of white supremacy.”

Love it or hate it, the Electoral College is here to stay because changing it would require “constitutional surgery,” says DeRosa. “You would need three-fourths of the states to ratify any change, and too many states that are intent on suppressing votes benefit from the Electoral College.” The downside? “If you never have to appeal to the electorate because you’re successfully suppressing some large part of it, then you have a broken system.”

The Electoral College – Top 3 Pros and Cons

Pro/Con Arguments | Discussion Questions | Take Action | Sources | More Debates

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 US 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 US Constitution , which also established the executive branch of the US 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 (DC 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, he or she 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 ]

On Monday Dec. 19, 2016, the electors in each state met to vote for President and Vice President of the United States. Of the 538 Electoral College votes available, Donald J. Trump received 304 votes, Hillary Clinton received 227 votes, and seven votes went to others: three for Colin Powell, one for Faith Spotted Eagle, one for John Kasich, one for Ron Paul, and one for Bernie Sanders). On Dec. 22, 2016, the results were certified in all 50 states. On Jan. 6, 2017, a joint session of the US Congress met to certify the election results and Vice President Joe Biden, presiding as President of the Senate, read the certified vote tally. [ 21 ] [ 22 ]

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 US 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 US 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 ] Tina Mulally, South Dakota Representative, stated 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.” Mulally introduced a resolution passed by South Dakota’s legislature that reads, “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.” [ 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 ] 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. Governor 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 ] Hans von Spakovsky, Senior Legal Fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former commissioner for the FEC, explained, “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.” [ 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 ] 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, further explained, “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.” [ 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 revealed 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 , explained that states are given electors based on its representation in the House and Senate, so small states get extra votes. Mukunda stated, “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 ] As Wilfred Wilfred Codrington III, Assistant Professor at Brooklyn Law School and a fellow at the Brennan Center, explained, “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.” [ 29 ] The racism at the root of the Electoral College persists, suppressing the votes of people of color in favor of voters from largely homogenously 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 332 million people in the United States, with population estimates predicting almost 342 million by 2024, the next presidential election. 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 ] Robert Nemanich, math teacher and former elector from Colorado Springs, stated, “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.” [ 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 ] Jesse Wegman, author of Let the People Pick the President , stated, “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.” [ 33 ] John Koza, Chairman of National Popular Vote, warned, “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 US 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 US national senators and representatives .

More Election Debate Topics

Should People Who Have Completed Felony Sentences Be Allowed to Vote?  – The pros and cons of the felon voting debate include arguments about the social contract, voting while in prison, and paying debts.

Should the Voting Age Be Lowered to 16? – Proponents say teens are knowledgeable enough to vote. Opponents say kids aren’t mature enough to vote.

Should Election Day Be Made a National Holiday?  – Proponents say an election day holiday will increase voter turnout. Opponents say would disadvantage low-income and blue collar workers.

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• The Electoral College and Its Effectiveness Words: 615
• Electoral College or Game of Elections Words: 1118
• Why the Electoral College is Necessary Words: 882
• Is the Electoral College Outdated? Words: 648
• Electoral College and Its Supports Words: 1349
• How the Electoral College Selects the President Words: 1208
• The Electoral College Institution Words: 276
• The Electoral College: Ensuring Fairness and Equality in Presidential Elections Words: 278
• The Electoral College Should Be Abolished Words: 401
• Electoral System in the USA and Its Fairness Words: 543
• Presidential Election Process in The United States Words: 617
• Two Party System in America: Origins, Pros and Cons Words: 1623
• The Electoral College’s Mission and Functions Words: 307
• Does Canada’s Electoral System Need Reforms? Words: 1151
• Social Change: Electoral Reform in the United States Words: 648
• Authoritarian States and Party Systems Words: 602
• College Education: Arguments For and Against Words: 1675
• Women’s Colleges in the USA Words: 658

Electoral College and Its Pros and Cons

Introduction.

The Electoral College is a group of representatives derived from each state and the District of Columbia, whose major role is to elect the president and the vice president of the United States of America. The College is established by the constitution of the United States, and it has been a critical part of America’s political system for decades. The candidate who gets the majority of the electoral votes is given authority to lead the country after the outcome of an election is certified by Congress. The College has been a hot topic for discussion that has attracted the attention of two different schools of thought. The first group comprises critics who oppose the system, and who have made several calls for either reforms or abolition. The second group is comprised of opponents who support the system and who have rejected calls for its abolishment. Both sides have compelling arguments that support their different political ideologies.

Pros of the Electoral College

The Electoral College has been in operation for more than two hundred years. Since its adoption as part of the US political system, several elections have been conducted and it has played a key role in facilitating the democratic appointment of a president without the influence of population numbers in different regions (Connors 13). The pros of the system include protecting the interests of the minority, facilitating a two-party system, directing more power to the states, and promoting the distribution of popular support.

Protecting Minority Interests

In contemporary America, the population of urban areas is higher compared to that of rural areas. Therefore, there is an uneven representation because of the differences in population density. Some states have low populations and a high number of rural metropolitans. The people in these areas mainly include farmers whose interests are not as valued as those of the middle class in cities are (Reed 64). In that regard, the Electoral College protects their interests because the president and the vice president are not elected by a popular vote (Houser 18). The system enhances political cohesiveness because it compels politicians to campaign in all areas of the country (Connors 17). If the top positions were filled through a popular vote, then candidates would focus their campaigns on highly populated areas. The need to acquire votes from multiple regions necessitates the creation of a campaign platform that has a national focus and appeal (Levine 53). Without the college, people in densely populated areas would be marginalized due to poor presentation.

Facilitating a Two-Party System

The US has two predominant political parties, namely the Democratic and the Republican Party. The political system has been widely criticized by historians and political scientists. However, research has shown that the structure creates more stability in the nation because issues of national concern are usually generalized and not specific (Houser 19). The system enhances the cohesiveness of the country because a candidate’s support must be distributed throughout the country for them to be elected president (Reed 75). In that regard, presidential candidates increase their chances of winning by forming coalitions of states and regions. This unifying mechanism is beneficial to national cohesiveness. Moreover, the two-party system absorbs third movements that have been historically shown to propagate radical views (Connors 24). The assimilation encourages the proliferation of two pragmatic political parties that focus on public opinion rather than extremist views that are characteristic of smaller parties.

Directing More Power to the States

The political system directs more power and control to the states because of the power to select representatives to the Electoral College. These delegates participate in the election of the president and represent the interests of all states regardless of their population (Levine 54). In that regard, the system maintains and enhances the success of a federal system of government and representation (Houser 23). The states have important political powers that allow them to address the interests of the citizens both in rural and urban metropolitans. For example, each state participates in the political decisions of the nation through its representatives in the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the Electoral College (Houser 29). Proponents of the system argue that abolishing the Electoral College would necessitate the abolishment of the Senate and the House of Representatives because they are comprised of individuals who represent all the jurisdictions of the US.

Promoting a Distribution of Popular Support

According to the structure of the Electoral College, a presidential candidate must receive support from all parts of the nation to win an election. A candidate’s popularity must be distributed nationally because electors are representatives of all the states (Levine 62). This system promotes political cohesiveness because people from different regions and states must come together to provide support to a certain candidate so that they can have a majority of the electoral votes (Medvic 42). This structure eradicates the probability that a candidate might spend their campaign resources on highly populated regions (Levine 64). Some states are considered swing votes. However, a candidate must receive support from all the regions of the country to win. No single region has the necessary number of electoral votes needed for a presidential candidate to win. A candidate who is popular in a certain region must appeal to voters in other regions to receive the necessary majority for victory.

Cons of the Electoral College

Opponents of the Electoral College have criticized its effectiveness in fostering democracy and national cohesiveness, and have argued that it should either be reformed or abolished. They have presented several reasons that support their argument that the system does not foster democracy, even though its proponents claim it does. The cons of the Electoral College include the possibility of electing a minority president, a failure to reflect the will of the nation, the uneven distribution of power to certain states, and the depression of voter turnout.

The Election of a Minority President

The major disadvantage of the Electoral College system is the probability of the election of a minority president. There is a risk of electing a president who does not have the majority of popular votes (Dufour 8). This occurrence could happen in three main ways. First, if more than two candidates vied for the presidential seat and shared the votes, there is a possibility that none of them would garner the necessary majority. This would happen if the people were so divided that the candidates shared the votes. In 1824, 1948, and 1968 the situation was witnessed (Medvic 63). Second, a minority presidential candidate could win if one of the candidates garnered the most votes in a few states while the other got enough votes to win the necessary majority of the Electoral College (Dufour 10). Third, an independent candidate could alter the numbers such that none of the two top candidates gets over 50% of the votes cast (Levine 78). Smaller states could have a larger percentage of votes because compared to their populations, thus compromising the integrity of the election about the will of the majority.

The Failure to Reflect the People’s Will

The Electoral College system fails to reflect the collective will of Americans in two ways. First, there is an over-representation of people in rural metropolitans because of the uneven distribution of votes based on population. Electors that represent each state in the College are determined by the number of representatives in the House and the Senate (Levine 49). In that regard, votes in different states carry different weights. Second, the system supports a winner-take-all approach as the candidate takes all the Electoral votes in the states they win the popular vote (Dufour 15). This makes it harder for independent candidates and third-party candidates to have any significant political influence in the Electoral College. For example, if an independent candidate received the support of 30% of the votes, he would still not qualify for any Electoral College votes (Levine 72). Therefore, the system discourages the participation of independent and third-party candidates, and so, it denies the electorate the opportunity to choose from a wide variety of candidates.

The Uneven Distribution of Power

Opponents of the Electoral College system argue that it gives too much power to smaller and swing states. This argument can be explained by comparing the states of California and Wyoming. California has 55 Electoral College votes, while Wyoming has three. Consequently, each Californian vote represents 705,454 citizens while a single vote in Wyoming represents 191,717 citizens. In that regard, there is an uneven distribution of power since one vote is not equivalent to one person (Dufour 19). Voters in less populous states have more power than voters in highly populated states have. The major political parties aim to win the support of voters in certain states to emerge victoriously. For instance, the Democratic Party aims to win the votes in California while the Republican Party aims to win the votes in Indiana (Klepeis 11). The concentration of electoral votes in certain states compels presidential candidates to focus their campaign efforts in specific states that have higher political influence. In 2016, a report by PBS NewsHour revealed that presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump had concentrated their campaigns in 11 major states, among them Ohio, Florida, and North Carolina (Ross 84). Some states have fixed voting patterns: Minnesota is largely Republican and Utah votes for the Democrat (Levine 83).

The Depression of Voter Turnout

The structure of the Electoral College discourages some voters from participating in elections because of the feeling that their preferred candidate might lose the election. For example, in the 2016 election, Hilary Clinton (the Democrat candidate) had a 15-to-20-point lead over Donald Trump (the Republican candidate) for a long period as shown by the results of the polls (Ross 91). However, the outcome showed a big difference with Donald Trump in the lead. Such an outcome could discourage some people from voting because of the poll’s indication that a win for their candidate of choice was inevitable as indicated by the polls. Another reason why the system depresses voter turnout is the effect of swing states. Some states are considered more important than others are because they are highly populated (Klepeis 14). For instance, California and New York are swing states (Ross 92). Many voters feel like these states are the sources of votes that count. Therefore, they fail to vote based on the assumption that their votes do not count.

The Electoral College has been part of the United State’s political system for more than 200 years. During that period, the system has been discussed and debated from both positive and negative perspectives. Opponents argue that it promotes inequality and it should be abolished. On the other hand, proponents argue that it enhances cohesiveness and political stability. From the foregoing discussion, it can be deduced that the Electoral College does not reflect the nation’s popular will due to the uneven distribution of votes in the Electoral College for each state. Moreover, presidential candidates pay more attention to swing states that have more electoral votes. The system favors poor rural regions over populous urban metropolitans.

The main goal of developing the system was to solve the problem of population disparity in the country. Since its creation, the population of the US has changed immensely. Moreover, the distribution of people in different states and regions has changed. Therefore, the system is ineffective in contemporary America. The system promotes the distribution of popular support. However, candidates pay more attention to states that might “swing” votes in their favor. They focus on states that include Ohio, California, New York, Iowa, Nevada, and Virginia. The importance of minor parties and representation is low because the Electoral College system encourages a two-party political structure. Therefore, the system should be abolished to create a more democratic the United States of America.

Works Cited

Connors, Kathleen. What is the Electoral College? Gareth Stevens Publishing LLLP, 2017.

Dufour, Fritz. Is the US Electoral College A Polite Fiction that Should Be Abolished:  The Harbinger Signs vs. The Perennial Head in the Sand Policy . Fritz Dufour, 2017.

Houser, Grace. Understanding U.S. Elections and the Electoral College . The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc, 2017.

Klepeis, Alicia. Understanding the Electoral College . The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc, 2017.

Levine, Herbert. What If the American Political System were Different ? Routledge, 2015.

Medvic, Stephen. Campaigns and Elections: Players and Processes . 2nd ed., Routledge, 2013.

Reed, Melody. Voting in America: Are we voting in Vain? Booktango, 2013.

Ross, Tara. The Indispensable Electoral College: How the Founder’s Plan Saves  Our Country from Mob Rule . Simon and Schuster, 2017.

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Key things to know about U.S. election polling in 2024

Confidence in U.S. public opinion polling was shaken by errors in 2016 and 2020. In both years’ general elections, many polls underestimated the strength of Republican candidates, including Donald Trump. These errors laid bare some real limitations of polling.

In the midterms that followed those elections, polling performed better . But many Americans remain skeptical that it can paint an accurate portrait of the public’s political preferences.

Restoring people’s confidence in polling is an important goal, because robust and independent public polling has a critical role to play in a democratic society. It gathers and publishes information about the well-being of the public and about citizens’ views on major issues. And it provides an important counterweight to people in power, or those seeking power, when they make claims about “what the people want.”

The challenges facing polling are undeniable. In addition to the longstanding issues of rising nonresponse and cost, summer 2024 brought extraordinary events that transformed the presidential race . The good news is that people with deep knowledge of polling are working hard to fix the problems exposed in 2016 and 2020, experimenting with more data sources and interview approaches than ever before. Still, polls are more useful to the public if people have realistic expectations about what surveys can do well – and what they cannot.

With that in mind, here are some key points to know about polling heading into this year’s presidential election.

Probability sampling (or “random sampling”). This refers to a polling method in which survey participants are recruited using random sampling from a database or list that includes nearly everyone in the population. The pollster selects the sample. The survey is not open for anyone who wants to sign up.

Online opt-in polling (or “nonprobability sampling”). These polls are recruited using a variety of methods that are sometimes referred to as “convenience sampling.” Respondents come from a variety of online sources such as ads on social media or search engines, websites offering rewards in exchange for survey participation, or self-enrollment. Unlike surveys with probability samples, people can volunteer to participate in opt-in surveys.

Nonresponse and nonresponse bias. Nonresponse is when someone sampled for a survey does not participate. Nonresponse bias occurs when the pattern of nonresponse leads to error in a poll estimate. For example, college graduates are more likely than those without a degree to participate in surveys, leading to the potential that the share of college graduates in the resulting sample will be too high.

Mode of interview. This refers to the format in which respondents are presented with and respond to survey questions. The most common modes are online, live telephone, text message and paper. Some polls use more than one mode.

Weighting. This is a statistical procedure pollsters perform to make their survey align with the broader population on key characteristics like age, race, etc. For example, if a survey has too many college graduates compared with their share in the population, people without a college degree are “weighted up” to match the proper share.

How are election polls being conducted?

Pollsters are making changes in response to the problems in previous elections. As a result, polling is different today than in 2016. Most U.S. polling organizations that conducted and publicly released national surveys in both 2016 and 2022 (61%) used methods in 2022 that differed from what they used in 2016 . And change has continued since 2022.

One change is that the number of active polling organizations has grown significantly, indicating that there are fewer barriers to entry into the polling field. The number of organizations that conduct national election polls more than doubled between 2000 and 2022.

This growth has been driven largely by pollsters using inexpensive opt-in sampling methods. But previous Pew Research Center analyses have demonstrated how surveys that use nonprobability sampling may have errors twice as large , on average, as those that use probability sampling.

The second change is that many of the more prominent polling organizations that use probability sampling – including Pew Research Center – have shifted from conducting polls primarily by telephone to using online methods, or some combination of online, mail and telephone. The result is that polling methodologies are far more diverse now than in the past.

(For more about how public opinion polling works, including a chapter on election polls, read our short online course on public opinion polling basics .)

All good polling relies on statistical adjustment called “weighting,” which makes sure that the survey sample aligns with the broader population on key characteristics. Historically, public opinion researchers have adjusted their data using a core set of demographic variables to correct imbalances between the survey sample and the population.

But there is a growing realization among survey researchers that weighting a poll on just a few variables like age, race and gender is insufficient for getting accurate results. Some groups of people – such as older adults and college graduates – are more likely to take surveys, which can lead to errors that are too sizable for a simple three- or four-variable adjustment to work well. Adjusting on more variables produces more accurate results, according to Center studies in 2016 and 2018 .

A number of pollsters have taken this lesson to heart. For example, recent high-quality polls by Gallup and The New York Times/Siena College adjusted on eight and 12 variables, respectively. Our own polls typically adjust on 12 variables . In a perfect world, it wouldn’t be necessary to have that much intervention by the pollster. But the real world of survey research is not perfect.

Predicting who will vote is critical – and difficult. Preelection polls face one crucial challenge that routine opinion polls do not: determining who of the people surveyed will actually cast a ballot.

Roughly a third of eligible Americans do not vote in presidential elections , despite the enormous attention paid to these contests. Determining who will abstain is difficult because people can’t perfectly predict their future behavior – and because many people feel social pressure to say they’ll vote even if it’s unlikely.

No one knows the profile of voters ahead of Election Day. We can’t know for sure whether young people will turn out in greater numbers than usual, or whether key racial or ethnic groups will do so. This means pollsters are left to make educated guesses about turnout, often using a mix of historical data and current measures of voting enthusiasm. This is very different from routine opinion polls, which mostly do not ask about people’s future intentions.

When major news breaks, a poll’s timing can matter. Public opinion on most issues is remarkably stable, so you don’t necessarily need a recent poll about an issue to get a sense of what people think about it. But dramatic events can and do change public opinion , especially when people are first learning about a new topic. For example, polls this summer saw notable changes in voter attitudes following Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race. Polls taken immediately after a major event may pick up a shift in public opinion, but those shifts are sometimes short-lived. Polls fielded weeks or months later are what allow us to see whether an event has had a long-term impact on the public’s psyche.

How accurate are polls?

The answer to this question depends on what you want polls to do. Polls are used for all kinds of purposes in addition to showing who’s ahead and who’s behind in a campaign. Fair or not, however, the accuracy of election polling is usually judged by how closely the polls matched the outcome of the election.

By this standard, polling in 2016 and 2020 performed poorly. In both years, state polling was characterized by serious errors. National polling did reasonably well in 2016 but faltered in 2020.

In 2020, a post-election review of polling by the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) found that “the 2020 polls featured polling error of an unusual magnitude: It was the highest in 40 years for the national popular vote and the highest in at least 20 years for state-level estimates of the vote in presidential, senatorial, and gubernatorial contests.”

How big were the errors? Polls conducted in the last two weeks before the election suggested that Biden’s margin over Trump was nearly twice as large as it ended up being in the final national vote tally.

Errors of this size make it difficult to be confident about who is leading if the election is closely contested, as many U.S. elections are .

Pollsters are rightly working to improve the accuracy of their polls. But even an error of 4 or 5 percentage points isn’t too concerning if the purpose of the poll is to describe whether the public has favorable or unfavorable opinions about candidates , or to show which issues matter to which voters. And on questions that gauge where people stand on issues, we usually want to know broadly where the public stands. We don’t necessarily need to know the precise share of Americans who say, for example, that climate change is mostly caused by human activity. Even judged by its performance in recent elections, polling can still provide a faithful picture of public sentiment on the important issues of the day.

The 2022 midterms saw generally accurate polling, despite a wave of partisan polls predicting a broad Republican victory. In fact, FiveThirtyEight found that “polls were more accurate in 2022 than in any cycle since at least 1998, with almost no bias toward either party.” Moreover, a handful of contrarian polls that predicted a 2022 “red wave” largely washed out when the votes were tallied. In sum, if we focus on polling in the most recent national election, there’s plenty of reason to be encouraged.

Compared with other elections in the past 20 years, polls have been less accurate when Donald Trump is on the ballot. Preelection surveys suffered from large errors – especially at the state level – in 2016 and 2020, when Trump was standing for election. But they performed reasonably well in the 2018 and 2022 midterms, when he was not.

During the 2016 campaign, observers speculated about the possibility that Trump supporters might be less willing to express their support to a pollster – a phenomenon sometimes described as the “shy Trump effect.” But a committee of polling experts evaluated five different tests of the “shy Trump” theory and turned up little to no evidence for each one . Later, Pew Research Center and, in a separate test, a researcher from Yale also found little to no evidence in support of the claim.

Instead, two other explanations are more likely. One is about the difficulty of estimating who will turn out to vote. Research has found that Trump is popular among people who tend to sit out midterms but turn out for him in presidential election years. Since pollsters often use past turnout to predict who will vote, it can be difficult to anticipate when irregular voters will actually show up.

The other explanation is that Republicans in the Trump era have become a little less likely than Democrats to participate in polls . Pollsters call this “partisan nonresponse bias.” Surprisingly, polls historically have not shown any particular pattern of favoring one side or the other. The errors that favored Democratic candidates in the past eight years may be a result of the growth of political polarization, along with declining trust among conservatives in news organizations and other institutions that conduct polls.

Whatever the cause, the fact that Trump is again the nominee of the Republican Party means that pollsters must be especially careful to make sure all segments of the population are properly represented in surveys.

The real margin of error is often about double the one reported. A typical election poll sample of about 1,000 people has a margin of sampling error that’s about plus or minus 3 percentage points. That number expresses the uncertainty that results from taking a sample of the population rather than interviewing everyone . Random samples are likely to differ a little from the population just by chance, in the same way that the quality of your hand in a card game varies from one deal to the next.

The problem is that sampling error is not the only kind of error that affects a poll. Those other kinds of error, in fact, can be as large or larger than sampling error. Consequently, the reported margin of error can lead people to think that polls are more accurate than they really are.

There are three other, equally important sources of error in polling: noncoverage error , where not all the target population has a chance of being sampled; nonresponse error, where certain groups of people may be less likely to participate; and measurement error, where people may not properly understand the questions or misreport their opinions. Not only does the margin of error fail to account for those other sources of potential error, putting a number only on sampling error implies to the public that other kinds of error do not exist.

Several recent studies show that the average total error in a poll estimate may be closer to twice as large as that implied by a typical margin of sampling error. This hidden error underscores the fact that polls may not be precise enough to call the winner in a close election.

Other important things to remember

Transparency in how a poll was conducted is associated with better accuracy . The polling industry has several platforms and initiatives aimed at promoting transparency in survey methodology. These include AAPOR’s transparency initiative and the Roper Center archive . Polling organizations that participate in these organizations have less error, on average, than those that don’t participate, an analysis by FiveThirtyEight found .

Participation in these transparency efforts does not guarantee that a poll is rigorous, but it is undoubtedly a positive signal. Transparency in polling means disclosing essential information, including the poll’s sponsor, the data collection firm, where and how participants were selected, modes of interview, field dates, sample size, question wording, and weighting procedures.

There is evidence that when the public is told that a candidate is extremely likely to win, some people may be less likely to vote . Following the 2016 election, many people wondered whether the pervasive forecasts that seemed to all but guarantee a Hillary Clinton victory – two modelers put her chances at 99% – led some would-be voters to conclude that the race was effectively over and that their vote would not make a difference. There is scientific research to back up that claim: A team of researchers found experimental evidence that when people have high confidence that one candidate will win, they are less likely to vote. This helps explain why some polling analysts say elections should be covered using traditional polling estimates and margins of error rather than speculative win probabilities (also known as “probabilistic forecasts”).

National polls tell us what the entire public thinks about the presidential candidates, but the outcome of the election is determined state by state in the Electoral College . The 2000 and 2016 presidential elections demonstrated a difficult truth: The candidate with the largest share of support among all voters in the United States sometimes loses the election. In those two elections, the national popular vote winners (Al Gore and Hillary Clinton) lost the election in the Electoral College (to George W. Bush and Donald Trump). In recent years, analysts have shown that Republican candidates do somewhat better in the Electoral College than in the popular vote because every state gets three electoral votes regardless of population – and many less-populated states are rural and more Republican.

For some, this raises the question: What is the use of national polls if they don’t tell us who is likely to win the presidency? In fact, national polls try to gauge the opinions of all Americans, regardless of whether they live in a battleground state like Pennsylvania, a reliably red state like Idaho or a reliably blue state like Rhode Island. In short, national polls tell us what the entire citizenry is thinking. Polls that focus only on the competitive states run the risk of giving too little attention to the needs and views of the vast majority of Americans who live in uncompetitive states – about 80%.

Fortunately, this is not how most pollsters view the world . As the noted political scientist Sidney Verba explained, “Surveys produce just what democracy is supposed to produce – equal representation of all citizens.”

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Home — Essay Samples — Government & Politics — Electoral College — Abolishing the Electoral College: A Case for Popular Vote

Abolishing The Electoral College: a Case for Popular Vote

• Categories: Democracy Democracy in America Electoral College

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Words: 1382 |

Published: May 17, 2022

Words: 1382 | Pages: 3 | 7 min read

Table of contents

The electoral college and characteristics of democracy, arguments for the continuation of the electoral college, works cited.

• Amar, A. R. (2006). The case for abolishing the Electoral College. Yale Law Journal, 115(2), 259-329.
• Banzhaf, J. F. (2004). The case against the Electoral College. Cardozo Law Review, 26(5), 2081-2093.
• Edwards, G. C., III. (2004). Why the Electoral College is bad for America. Yale University Press.
• Hasen, R. L. (2016). The electoral college as a failed experiment: Why we should amend the Constitution to replace it. Harvard Law & Policy Review, 10(1), 9-37.
• Hershey, M. R. (2019). The electoral college and American democracy : Why the electoral college is bad for America. Routledge.
• Keyssar, A. (2020). Why do we still have the Electoral College? Harvard University Press.
• Longley, L. D., & Pierce, R. J. (2021). The Electoral College primer 2020. Rowman & Littlefield.
• McCarty, N., Poole, K. T., & Rosenthal, H. (2006). Polarized America: The dance of ideology and unequal riches. MIT Press.
• Rakove, J. N. (2010). The first American constitution: The Articles of Confederation. Stanford University Press.
• Williams, R. M. (2017). Electoral College reform: Challenges and possibilities. Lexington Books.

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How does the Electoral College work?

Americans vote at the Olbrich Botanical Gardens polling place on Nov. 8, 2022 in Madison, Wisconsin. (Jim Vondruska/Getty Images)

During a presidential election in the United States, a candidate is not chosen based on their national popularity, but rather based on how many Electoral College votes they get. 

The Electoral College is a group of intermediaries who choose the president and vice president of the U.S. 

It consists of 538 members, one for each U.S. senator and representative. 

How many electors does each state have? 

How does the electoral college work.

The Electoral College was devised at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. It was a compromise between those who wanted direct popular elections for president and those who preferred to have Congress decide. 

Once votes are cast for whichever presidential candidate you’ve chosen, the vote goes to a statewide tally. 

In 48 states and Washington, D.C., the winner gets all of the electoral votes for that state. 

For example, California has 55 electoral votes. Once voters cast their ballots, whoever has the higher tally of votes, they will then get all 55 electoral votes. 

A candidate needs at least 270 electors to win, that’s more than half of the total electoral votes.  

How is a state’s electoral number determined? 

The number of electoral votes that each state has are determined based on the data collected by the Census Bureau. 

Typically, a state has two senators at minimum and at least one congressional district. The number of congressional districts is based on how many people live in that state, according to the 270 to Win website.  

Popular vote v. electoral votes

Yes, there is a difference. 

It is possible for a presidential candidate to win the popular vote but still lose the election because they were unable to get a majority of electoral votes. 

In other U.S. elections, candidates are directly elected based on the popular vote. Only the president and vice president are not directly elected by citizens. They are chosen based on the Electoral College process, according to USA.gov. 

Do other countries have electoral colleges? 

Electoral colleges can be found in France, Germany, Estonia, Madagascar, Pakistan and other countries — but not all of them use it to choose a chief executive. 

Historically, the College of Cardinals — who select the Pope — is an electoral college. And the same can be said for the prince-electors who determined the Holy Roman Emperor.

Republicans’ New, Dangerous Attempt to Break the Election

Even if the Supreme Court rejects this plea, the GOP will advance its cause of sowing doubt in the electoral process all the same.

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

Updated at 11:27 a.m. ET on August 26, 2024

Only months before November’s elections, the Republican National Committee has launched a new legal attack on the rules that govern federal elections. Supported by 24 states, the RNC is seeking, on an emergency basis, a Supreme Court ruling that the United States Congress lacks the constitutional authority to regulate presidential elections—congressional elections, yes, but not elections held to select presidents. The petitioners’ immediate goal is to allow the state of Arizona to impose a “proof of citizenship” requirement as a condition of a person’s right to vote for president.

If they are to succeed, the Court will have to suddenly, with mere weeks left before people start voting, abandon or explain away a decision it rendered in 2013—that Congress has the power to establish rules for voter registration in presidential elections. But even if the suit fails, it risks achieving some success in sowing doubt about the integrity of elections, highlighting claims of illegal voting by immigrants, and laying a foundation for post-election allegations of fraud and related legal challenges. (I have advised the national Democratic Party on this suit and have been further monitoring it as part of nonpartisan work to support election administrators in their preparation for the fall elections.)

The RNC target in this suit is a federal statute, the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), enacted in 1993 to establish uniform, simplified, and nondiscriminatory rules for the registration of voters in federal elections. NVRA requires states to provide registration opportunities at their motor-vehicle departments and public-assistance agencies, and directed the adoption of procedures to keep voter rolls accurate and current. The law also mandated a federal voter-registration form that states must “accept and use.” The form requires an attestation of citizenship under penalty of perjury and no further documentation.

Read: Should voter registration be automatic?

But in 2022, Arizona passed a law requiring its voters to submit , along with the federal form, documentary proof of citizenship (DPOC), such as a passport or a birth certificate. Under that law, Arizonans who register to vote with this form but do not provide DPOC would be barred from voting at all for president, and from voting by mail in any other election in the state. The state has never enforced the law, for one reason: In 2013, the Supreme Court had held that the NVRA preempted an earlier version of this requirement—constitutional-law-speak for not permitting the state to add its own DPOC mandate to the attestation called for by the federal form. This meant that the state could impose its own requirement only for state elections. Ever since then, only those Arizona voters who did not use the federal form to register were required by law to supply DPOC, but even this was not enforced.

With more than half the states in its corner, Arizona now argues in effect that the Supreme Court got it wrong, because, in its view, the Constitution confers on the states exclusive authority to regulate presidential elections. Congress can force the form without DPOC on the states for congressional elections only. The RNC and its allies claim as one source of authority the Constitution’s electors clause, which empowers states to establish the process for the appointment of presidential electors and, the petitioners argue, provides them with the broad authority they are seeking over the rules for registering in presidential elections. This reliance on the electors clause will be familiar to readers who followed the controversy over the so-called independent legislature doctrine, which in its most extreme articulation would somehow allow legislatures alleging “fraud” to disregard the popular vote for president and appoint their own preferred electors. In a 2022 case testing the boundaries of the clause, the Supreme Court did not move down that path .

The petitioners in the current case urge the Court to share their worry about undocumented immigrants voting illegally, and to recognize the urgency of giving states the constitutional latitude to deal with it. In their amicus brief, the 24 states allege that such voting is widespread: “The problem of non-citizen voting has gotten worse, as the number of aliens in the United States has undeniably grown.” These votes have been numerous enough, they assert, to have delivered victories to Democrats in states such as Minnesota and North Carolina, in both Senate and presidential elections. In the view of these petitioners, the states should be able to do something about it, and the Constitution does not allow the federal government to get in the way of laws like Arizona’s, specifically in presidential elections. (There is, in fact, no evidence of any such pervasive undocumented-immigrant voting, much less any kind of systematic voter fraud.)

The earlier 2013 decision is one hurdle that the RNC and its allies confront, but not the only one. The Court has made clear in other cases, as in those involving presidential campaign finance, that Congress does indeed have the power to regulate presidential elections: “Congress has the power to regulate Presidential elections and primaries,” the Court said in Buckley v. Valeo , affirming its position in the earlier case of Burroughs v. United States , that Congress can use that power to safeguard those elections from corruption.

The Court has also upheld Congress’s authority to lower the voting age in presidential elections, to prohibit disqualification of voters in presidential and vice-presidential elections for failure to meet state residency requirements, and to provide uniform national rules in those elections for absentee voting. Additional federal laws on the books for years protect against the coercion of voters in presidential elections and ensure that members of the armed forces and other overseas voters have access to the ballot.

NVRA rests on additional constitutional foundations. Congress’s power to regulate federal voter registration also derives from the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments’ protections against racial discrimination. NVRA contains “findings” in support of its provisions, one of which is that “discriminatory and unfair registration laws and procedures can have a direct and damaging effect on voter participation in elections for Federal office and disproportionately harm voter participation by various groups, including racial minorities.”

And the RNC has a significant timing problem. Under the Purcell principle—the name of a relevant case decided in yet another Arizona election-law controversy—11th-hour legal maneuvers for changes in election laws are disfavored, in an effort to reduce the risk of “voter confusion and consequent incentive to remain away from the polls.” Yet the RNC has shown up at the Supreme Court, less than three months prior to the next presidential election, to make a bold constitutional claim and to seek “emergency” action to enable it to enforce a law it passed two years ago.

In the meantime, thousands of Arizona voters have registered with the federal form without providing DPOC—because federal law does not require them to do so. A last-minute decision by the Court to allow Arizona to enforce its DPOC law could throw all of these registrations into question—the sort of chaos and confusion, seriously undermining the orderly administration of the election within months of the election, that the Court has counseled the judiciary to strive to avoid.

Read: The decision that could end voting rights

Faced with the unfavorable Court ruling in 2013, the RNC and its state supporters are well aware of the aggressive nature of their move. The states are calling for the Court to “overrule” or “cabin”—a legal term for “narrow”—that decision, from which Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented. The RNC and its allies likely see them as candidates to revisit it. Justice Neil Gorsuch, too, has joined Thomas in stating concern over the “federalization” of state-court rulings in election-law cases. Here, then, are three possible votes. The petitioners might believe more are persuadable.

But winning in Court may not be all that the RNC hopes to gain. Even if they lose, the RNC and its co-litigants will be building a case for post-election claims of illegal voting—illegal noncitizen voting in particular. They’ll charge that the federal government under Democratic control will let it happen, because, as petitioners allege in their cited examples of Minnesota and North Carolina, Democrats will benefit. The RNC and its supporters will say that they did what they could, warning of the threat and appealing to the Court, and that they were defeated only by process—fealty to the Purcell principle. As a political calculation, perhaps it works either way: The courts can be their vehicle for messaging about illegal voting, win or lose.

A strategy to pursue political gamesmanship in the courts is also not incompatible with a longer-term legal strategy. The Court may reject the “emergency relief” in this new Arizona case, but the Justices may still take up this issue in due course. The RNC under Donald Trump’s leadership is seeding the election-law landscape with other claims that may have poor prospects of yielding immediate gain, and yet remain available for development and better success later. In two states, the RNC is bringing claims that states cannot process any mail-in ballots after midnight of Election Day, even if cast and received within the period specified by state law. It is apparently setting up these cases for Supreme Court review. And the “independent-state-legislature doctrine” is by no means gone for good.

The “ voting wars ,” as the legal scholar Richard L. Hasen has termed the legal battles over elections, appear certain to rage on. They have intensified under the pressures of election denialism and the grievances of a former president over an election he will not concede he lost. Now the Supreme Court will have to decide, whatever course this conflict takes in the years ahead, whether it will entertain novel and potentially destabilizing legal claims as election administrators complete their preparations for the fall, and the voting begins.

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US Elections 2024: The U.S. Presidential election on November 5 will involve Republicans and Democrats competing for the highest office. Candidates aim for 270 out of 538 electoral votes from the Electoral College. This system, a compromise by the Founding Fathers, accounts for state populations and varies from a direct national popular vote.

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