Explaining the U.S. Electoral College
Last November, amidst the usual panic of end-of-semester exams, one particular overseas event gripped the attention of not only many QUT law students but also of people all around the world: the 2020 U.S. presidential election. The election inspired widespread hope that the Biden administration would usher in a new era of diplomacy, compassion and civility in global politics. However, it has also left many people puzzled by the United States’ unusual method of electing its head of state and government.
This article will walk you through the basic principles of the Electoral College and exactly why the number ‘270’ becomes so incredibly important every four years.
What is the Electoral College?
In the U.S., voters do not directly vote for the President in November. Instead, the President is elected by a relatively small group of people (‘electors’) who gather in the nation’s capital, Washington D.C., in mid-December of an election year.
Who are the electors?
It is up to each state to select the people who will represent it in the Electoral College. In most states, each party (the Democratic Party and the Republican Party) chooses its electors in a vote at their state party convention. Electors tend to be people with some sort of longstanding connection to the party and are selected in recognition and as a reward for their service. For example, 2016 Democratic Presidential Nominee Hillary Clinton was one of the Democratic Party’s electors for the State of New York in 2020.
How many electors are there?
Each state gets one elector for each member it has in the U.S. Congress. The U.S. Congress is roughly equivalent to our Parliament of Australia. Like Parliament, Congress has two houses: the Houses of Representatives and the Senate. In Congress, each state is represented by two senators. Each state also gets a certain number of seats in the House of Representatives roughly based on its population.
For example, Illinois has 18 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, plus two senators, so it gets 20 (18 + 2) Electoral College votes. Texas, on the other hand, is home to about twice as many people, so it gets 36 seats in the House of Representatives and 38 Electoral College votes altogether.
Since there are 100 senators (for 50 states), 435 members of the House of Representatives, and D.C. gets 3 votes of its own (even though it isn’t a state), there are 100 + 435 + 3 = 538 members of the Electoral College.
To win the presidency, a candidate must receive the majority of the Electoral College votes. Half of 538 is 269, so the ‘magic number’ of Electoral College votes needed to have a majority is 270.
Then why do Americans go to the polls if the result is just up to 538 people?
When Americans vote, they are voting to decide which party’s electors should get to go to Washington D.C. to vote for the President on their behalf.
In 48 states and Washington D.C., electors are assigned on a winner-take-all basis. This means that whoever wins the most votes in that state will get all of the states’ Electoral College votes. To use 2020 as an example, Donald Trump received 52% of the votes that Texans cast in November. This means the Republican Party (and, by extension, Donald Trump) will receive all 38 of Texas’ Electoral College votes while Joe Biden will not get any.
Two states, Nebraska and Maine, do things a bit differently. They award two electors to the candidate that wins the most votes in the state and then award one for winning each of the states’ congressional districts. (‘Congressional districts’ are effectively the U.S. equivalent of Australia’s electorates.) This means Joe Biden received three of Maine’s four electors (for winning 53% of the overall vote in Maine and winning the most votes in one of its congressional districts) while Donald Trump received its remaining elector (for winning the most votes in Maine’s other congressional district).
This all seems unnecessarily confusing, so why does the Electoral College even exist?
The Electoral College emerged as a compromise between delegates at the U.S. Constitutional Convention in 1787. Some argued Congress should get to choose the President, wary of the outcome should ordinary citizens have too much of a say. Others believed it should be directly up to the people in a ‘popular vote’ for President.
However, the Southern states were particularly concerned that a popular vote could lead to their interests being overlooked on the national stage. While the populations of the North and South were relatively equal, about a third of Southerners were in slavery and so would be ineligible to vote for the President. This would give the North more power to choose the President if each (free) man had an equal vote. Therefore, the delegates agreed on a ‘solution’: indirect voting via an Electoral College which counted slaves as 3/5 of a person when assigning Electoral College votes to each state.
Why are there calls to abolish the Electoral College in favour of a popular vote?
Aside from its racist origins, there are perhaps two main issues with the Electoral College.
The allocation of electors between states: Smaller states (like Wyoming and Vermont) receive a disproportionately large number of votes in the Electoral College compared to their more populous counterparts (like California and Texas).
The winner-take-all system: Assuming you don’t live in Maine or Nebraska, even if your preferred candidate only loses the popular vote in your state by a single vote, every single one of your states’ Electoral College votes will go to the other candidate. This means that, if you’re a Democrat in Alaska (a historically Republican-leaning state) or a Republican in California (which is known for its overwhelming preference for the Democrats), you’re out of luck. Your vote is highly unlikely to make a difference as to where any of your states’ Electoral College votes go.
As a result, politicians tend to pay particular attention to ‘swing states’ like Pennsylvania and Michigan, since they often flip back and forth between Democrat and Republican candidates. Even a marginal victory in one of these states would send a considerable number of Electoral College votes in a candidate’s direction.
This means that the candidate who receives the most votes nationwide does not necessarily become the President. In fact, the president-elect has lost the popular vote five times in U.S. history, including most recently in the 2016 election when Hillary Clinton won almost three million more popular votes than President Donald Trump.
So can America just get rid of the Electoral College?
Amending the U.S. Constitution to abolish the Electoral College would require the agreement of two-thirds of the House of Representatives, two-thirds of the Senate and the legislatures of 38 out of the 50 states. There have been more than seven hundred attempts in Congress to abolish the Electoral College over the past two centuries. None have succeeded, and it’s generally considered unlikely smaller states or swing states would be willing to sacrifice the significant electoral power they wield under the current system any time soon.
Therefore, some states have agreed on a creative loophole: the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC). Under the agreement, each state would allocate all its Electoral College votes to the candidate that won the national popular vote, even if that candidate lost the state-wide vote. Fifteen states (and the District of Columbia) have signed on so far, but the compact only comes into effect once enough states have joined that they would control at least 270 of the electoral votes and could determine the outcome of the election.
It will be interesting to see if other states jump on board in the years to come.
Article by Morgan Lynch
This article appeared in the The Gavel #1 ‘The Among Us Issue’ (2021) Publication