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The United States is the only democracy in the world where a presidential candidate who wins the highest number of (popular) votes may still lose the election. This has happened at least four times in the past, including twice — in 2000 and 2016 — in this century (Table). The reason is the role played by the Electoral College in the American system.
In US’s unique electoral system, votes cast by the public in favour of a presidential candidate (the popular vote) are actually meant to elect that candidate’s preferred electors. These electors then vote for the President after the election. The Electoral College is a process comprising the selection of these electors, the meeting where they vote for the President and Vice President, and the counting of the electoral votes by Congress.
The Electoral College comprises 538 electors, and a candidate needs to secure a majority of 270 electoral votes to be elected.
The number of electors varies from state to state. Each state has the same number of electors as the size of its Congressional delegation — one for each member of the House of Representatives plus two for the two Senators.
California, with 54 electors, has the largest allocation in the Electoral College. Six states — Alaska, Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming — and the District of Columbia are allocated three electors each, the smallest delegations in the college.
Prior to the election, the two political parties select a slate of preferred electors in each state. The selection is based on established conventions that vary from state to state and party to party. A party’s slate generally comprises long-time members and workers, or people with a personal or political affiliation with the party’s presidential candidate.
There are very few provisions in the US Constitution regarding who is qualified to be an elector. Members of Congress or any person “holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States” cannot be an elector.
The post-Civil War 14th Amendment also barred state officials “who have engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the US, or “given aid and comfort to its enemies” from serving as electors.
The Electoral College is chosen by popular vote. This is essentially what the election on November 5 is for. Ballots in many states even mention the names of the respective candidate’s slate of electors.
Most states have a “winner takes all” system, meaning whoever wins the popular mandate in the state secures its entire allocation in the Electoral College. This is central to how electioneering works in the US. Candidates tend to focus on states where the race is close — the so-called “swing states” — and have limited incentive to allocate their campaign’s time and resources to states where they are either firmly winning or losing.
Two states — Maine (4 electors) and Nebraska (5 electors) — are exceptions to the winner-takes-all system. Both employ a specific form of proportional representation in which the state winner receives two electors, and the winner of each congressional district (who may or may not be the same as the state winner) receives one elector.
Electors meet in their respective state capitals on the Tuesday after the second Wednesday in December to cast their electoral votes on separate ballots for the President and Vice President. This is by and large a formality as electors seldom vote for someone other than their party’s candidate.
That said, there is no federal law or constitutional provision that requires electors to vote according to the result of the popular vote in their state. But some states require electors to pledge allegiance to the party — failure to honour which can result in their replacement by the party with substitute electors — or bind them by law to honour the popular mandate.
More than 99% of electors in US history have voted as pledged. The 2016 election was the last time a spate of so-called “faithless electors” refused to vote for their party’s candidate. Many were disqualified and replaced, and/ or fined according to specific state provisions.
While drafting the constitution, the so-called founding fathers debated how the “National Executive” (now referred to as the President) should be elected.
One proposal was for the President to be elected by Congress, on the lines of the Westminster model which is followed in Britain and most of its former colonies, including India. Those in favour of this system felt that voters could not be trusted with a direct vote, and that a system of direct elections could lead to the President pandering to the “democratic mob”.
The other proposal was to hold direct elections in which the chief executive would be chosen by popular vote. Such a system had not been seen yet, but many Constitution framers believed it would prevent corruption and collusion between the executive and legislature.
Ultimately, the founding fathers arrived at a compromise. “They were tired, impatient, frustrated. They cobbled together this plan because they couldn’t agree on anything else,” political scientist George Edwards III told History.com.
Founding father Alexander Hamilton argued that “the process of election affords a moral certainty, 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” while ensuring that “the sense of the people” still operates in the system.
Another stated reason for having an Electoral College was to prevent populous states/ regions from dominating unfairly. “Proponents argue that the Electoral College system contributes to the cohesiveness of the country by requiring a distribution of popular support to be elected president. Without such a mechanism, they point out, presidents would be selected either through the domination of one populous region over the others or through the domination of large metropolitan areas over the rural ones,” William C Kimberling wrote in The Electoral College (1992).
📌 The Electoral College reduces the value of each individual vote in bigger states. For instance, California has roughly 68 times as many people as Wyoming — but only 18 times as many Electoral College votes.
Jesse Wegman, author of Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College (2020), told NPR: “…Representative democracy in the 21st century is about political equality. It’s about one person, one vote — everybody’s vote counting equally.”
📌 The winner-takes-all mechanism inflates the importance of swing states in the eventual result, and does not reflect the votes of millions of Americans who vote for the non-dominant party in a traditionally Red (Republican) or Blue (Democratic) state. Thus, in 2020, Donald Trump got only 68.62% of the popular vote in West Virginia, but secured all four of its Electoral College votes. And Joe Biden won 63.48% of the popular vote in California but all 54 of its Electoral College votes.
📌 The system effectively binds electors to vote for their party, nullifying the intended purpose of preventing unsuitable candidates from getting the top job. Critics argue that the Electoral College has no place in a modern representative democracy — indeed, the system has been scrapped by all other democracies in favour of direct elections for the President.
