What Is The Electoral College?
By Chuck Hyde, Editor of StandBesideHer.com
The electoral college is actually quite easy but is little understood by a lot of Americans. Unlike elections for other offices such as the US Senate, the US House of Representatives, Governors, etc., the President of the US is not elected by popular vote, we use the Electoral College as set forth in the US Constitution. There have been four instances in which a candidate has lost the popular vote but won the electoral vote; John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, and George W. Bush.
The Electoral College is established in Article II, Section 1 of the constitution:
“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: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.”
What this is saying is that electoral votes are assigned to each state based on the number of Senators and Representatives in the state. Obviously, each state has two Senators so each state gets two electoral votes for them. The remaining number of electoral votes for each state is based on the number of Representatives the state has. There are 435 members of the House of Representatives and they are divided among the states by population. This is based on the US Census and changes with the new census every ten years. So as an example, Alaska has two Senators and one Representative so they have 3 electors, California on the other hand has two Senators and 53 Representatives so they have 55 electors.
There are a total of 538 electors in the Electoral College. 100 electors are assigned due to the members of the US Senate, 435 electors are assigned based on the number of members of the US House, and the District of Columbia is assigned three electors according to the 23rd Amendment:
“The District constituting the seat of Government of the United States shall appoint in such manner as the Congress may direct: A number of electors of President and Vice President equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives in Congress to which the District would be entitled if it were a State, but in no event more than the least populous State; they shall be in addition to those appointed by the States, but they shall be considered, for the purposes of the election of President and Vice President, to be electors appointed by a State; and they shall meet in the District and perform such duties as provided by the twelfth article of amendment.”
A candidate needs 270 electoral votes to win the presidential election. The members of the Electoral College meet in their state on the Monday following the second Wednesday in December to place their vote. These votes are sealed and sent to the President of the Senate. On January 6th the President of the Senate opens the votes and reads them before members of both houses of Congress. If no candidate receives enough votes than the US Constitution gives the US House of Representatives the authority to elect the President stating that a President is chosen from the three candidates with the most votes in the popular election by a representative from each state. Furthermore, the assigning of electors has some variance based on laws in the individual states. Some states have a winner takes all policy in which the candidate that wins the popular vote of the state is assigned the electoral votes from the state. Other states assign the electors based on political affiliation. An elector can even change their vote, there is not a federal law that binds them to the vote assigned them by the voters. Traditionally though electors tend to respect the will of the people and vote their electoral vote accordingly.
There is significant controversy over the electoral college, controversy that was renewed with the belief by some that Al Gore by virtue of his popular win should have been selected President. In this case though the US Supreme Court, based on the rule of law, awarded the election to George Bush due to his win in the Electoral College. The argument is that the president should be chosen by popular vote of the people. The argument for the Electoral College is that it gives small, less populous states a voice in the selection of president. Furthermore, it prevents an overwhelming win in a densely populated region from deciding the election. As an example, a candidate that is strongly popular in the south or in the northeast could win the popular vote even though the rest of the country may be more evenly divided.
About The Author: Chuck Hyde is editor of StandBesideHer.com. He is also a husband and father of two teenage boys and a younger daughter. His family lives in the northern Midwestern rural United States, where they enjoy camping, fishing, and other outdoor activities together. Chuck is a Registered Nurse in an inner city emergency room and has had a lifelong addiction to politics.
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