The president and vice president aren’t elected directly by United States citizens. Rather, they are chosen through the Electoral College.
The process has sparked debate for years. How did the Electoral College come to be, and how does it work? Is the process fair? (In 1969, New Jersey representatives of the House attempted to do away with the process.)
Katherine McCabe, an associate professor and undergraduate adviser in the Department of Political Science at the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences, and William Field, a teaching professor in the same department and deputy director of the Center for Critical Intelligence Studies, discuss the reasoning behind the Electoral College, how the process works and arguments for and against it.
What were the original reasons for establishing the Electoral College?
Field: The purpose of the electoral college was three-fold. First was to empower states where enslavement was legal: while enslaved people could not vote, their numbers contributed to the number of electoral votes assigned to that state. Second was to raise the relevance of the smaller states so the big states – at the time New York and Virginia – couldn’t simply walk all over them. Third was to simplify the presidential selection process since the electors were chosen by the state legislators, not a popular election.
Obviously, point one and point three have fallen by the wayside since near-universal adult suffrage is the norm now. The second point remains, though: One cannot create a victorious coalition by winning every vote in the 10 most populous states while ignoring the rest of the country.
How does the Electoral College work in practice?
McCabe: When people in a state cast a vote for president in the elections, their votes are used to direct a set of “electors” on how to vote during the meeting of the Electoral College.
A presidential candidate needs to win a majority of the Electoral College votes: 270 of the 538 votes available. Each state and the District of Columbia have at least three electors, with more populous states having more electors than less populous states. The number of electors is allocated to states according to the number of congressional districts in a state (based on population) plus two senators.
In mid-December, the electors meet and cast votes for president and vice president. If no candidate achieves a majority of the Electoral College vote, then the election is decided by the House of Representatives, where each state delegation gets one vote.
In most states, the candidate who receives the plurality of the statewide popular vote earns all of the state’s electoral votes. However, states get to decide how this is done. In Maine and Nebraska, electoral votes can be split between candidates: A candidate can earn two of the state’s votes based on winning the statewide popular vote and earns additional votes for each congressional district won in the state.
What are the main arguments for and against the Electoral College system?
Field: The main argument against the Electoral College system is that it is very possible to win the presidency without winning a majority of votes cast. That happened in 1992, 2000 and 2016. In 2000, George Bush was elected president despite getting 550,000 fewer votes than Al Gore, and, in 2016, Donald Trump was elected despite winning 1.3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. It could happen again this fall.
It’s worth noting that we didn’t have direct elections for president at our nation’s founding. George Washington was elected “unanimously,” when electors, chosen by state legislators in 10 of the 13 states, cast their votes for him.
The popular vote didn’t emerge until 1824 and even then the right to vote was limited to a small number of people.
Are there proposals for reforming or abolishing the Electoral College, and what are their potential impacts?
Field: There are calls to abolish the Electoral College and elect the president by a pure popular vote, but this would require amending the Constitution. We have a built-in pro-Republican bias since many of the small states, like Montana, are rural and “deep red” and the small states like their outsized influence and the political bias that extra influence provides, so getting their support would be hard.
There is a proposal, called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, to create a system that would retain the Electoral College but would force the electors to adhere to the national popular vote outcome. Under this proposal, state legislators would pass into law a resolution requiring their electors to vote for the candidate who won the most votes nationally, regardless of who won in any specific state. So far, 17 states, including New Jersey, have passed this law covering 209 electoral votes. The compact will take effect when states holding 270 votes have signed on.
How does the Electoral College affect the political influence of smaller states versus larger states? For example, what impact does New Jersey have on the Electoral College?
McCabe: Small states can be thought to have greater political influence due to the way the electors are allocated across states, which gives each state an additional two votes, regardless of population, based on the two senators each state has.
States like Wyoming or Vermont have proportionately more electors relative to their population, as compared to larger states. In this way, a single voter in New Jersey has less influence on the Electoral College than a single voter in the least populous states.
Another measure of political influence is how much attention voters in a particular state receive from the candidates for president. The vote in New Jersey will contribute 14 votes for the Electoral College. We have certainly seen cases where candidates campaign and devote attention to states with similar or even smaller numbers of electoral votes, such as Wisconsin (10), Nevada (6), Michigan (15), and Arizona (11). However, those states have been much more competitive than Democratic-leaning New Jersey in recent elections.
States projected to be “battleground” or “swing” states tend to receive more advertising spending and candidate visits than less competitive states. You are much more likely to see a campaign presence in nearby swing state, Pennsylvania, than in New Jersey, with perhaps the exception of those living in New Jersey who see television ads as a part of the Philadelphia media market.
