Who elects the US president? When Americans cast their ballots in the US presidential election, they are actually voting for a representative of a presidential candidate’s party known as an elector.
There are 538 electors who then vote for the candidate on behalf of the people in their state.
Each state is assigned a certain number of these electoral votes, based on the number of congressional districts a state has, plus two additional electoral votes representing the state’s seats in the US Senate.
Illustration: June Hsu
The District of Columbia, representing the US capital, Washington, is also assigned three electoral votes, despite having no voting representation in the US Congress.
A majority of 270 of these votes is needed to win the presidency.
The process of nominating electors varies by state and by party, but is generally done one of two ways: Ahead of the election, political parties either choose electors at their national conventions, or they are voted for by the party’s central committee.
The US Electoral College nearly always operates with a winner-takes-all system, in which the candidate with the highest number of popular votes in a state claims all of that state’s electoral votes.
For example, to become US president in 2016, Donald Trump beat former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton in Florida by a margin of just 2.2 percent, meaning that he could claim all 29 of Florida’s crucial electoral votes.
Such small margins in a handful of key swing states meant that, regardless of Clinton’s national popular vote lead, Trump was able to clinch victory in several swing states and therefore win more Electoral College votes.
Former US vice president Joe Biden, Trump’s competitor in the election on Tuesday next week, could face the same hurdle, meaning that he would need to focus his attention on a handful of battleground states to win the presidency.
While the number of electoral votes a state is assigned somewhat reflects its population, the minimum of three electoral votes per state means that the relative value of electoral votes varies across the US.
The least populous states like North and South Dakota, and the smaller states of New England are overrepresented because of the required minimum electoral votes.
Meanwhile, the states with the most people — California, Texas and Florida — are underrepresented in the Electoral College.
Wyoming has one electoral vote for every 193,000 people, compared with California’s rate of one electoral vote per 718,000 people. This means that each electoral vote in California represents more than three times as many people as one in Wyoming. These disparities are repeated across the country.
Who does it favor? Experts have warned that, after returning two US presidents that lost the popular vote since 2000, the Electoral College is flawed.
In 2000, former US vice president Al Gore won more than half a million more popular votes than then-Texas governor George W. Bush, yet Bush became US president after winning Florida by just 537 popular votes.
In all, the US has had five presidents who lost the popular vote, but won the election.
George Edwards, a professor at Texas A&M University, said: “The Electoral College violates the core tenet of democracy, that all votes count equally, and allows the candidate finishing second to win the election. Why hold an election if we do not care who received the most votes?”
“At the moment, the electoral college favors Republicans because of the way Republican votes are distributed across the country. They are more likely to occur in states that are closely divided between the parties,” Edwards said.
Under the winner-takes-all system, the margin of victory in a state becomes irrelevant. In 2016, Clinton’s substantial margins in states such as California and New York failed to earn her enough electoral votes, while close races in the battleground states of Pennsylvania and Michigan took Trump over the 270 majority.
As candidates easily win the electoral votes of their solid states, the election plays out in a handful of key battlegrounds.
In 2016, Trump won six such states — Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — adding 99 electoral votes to his total.
The demographics of these states differ from the national average. They are older, have more white voters without college degrees and often have smaller non-white populations. These characteristics generally favor Republicans — and made up the base of Trump’s popular votes in 2016.
For example, 67 percent of non-college-educated white people voted for Trump in the 2016 election. In all six swing states, this demographic is overrepresented by at least six percentage points more than the national average.
Several alternative systems for electing the US president have been proposed and grown in favor, as many seek to change or abolish the Electoral College.
Two states — Maine and Nebraska — already use a different method of assigning their electoral college votes. The two “Senate” votes go to the state-wide popular vote winner, but the remaining district votes are awarded to the winner of that district.
However, implementing this congressional district method across the country could result in greater bias than the current system. The popular vote winner could still lose the election, and the distribution of voters would still strongly favor Republicans.
The National Popular Vote Compact (NPVC) is another option, in which each state would award all of its Electoral College votes in line with the national popular vote. If enough states signed up to this agreement to reach the majority of 270 electors, the candidate who gained the most popular votes nationwide would always win the presidency.
However, the NPVC has more practical issues. Norman Williams, a professor at Willamette University, questioned how a nationwide recount would be carried out under the NPVC, and said that partisanship highlighted its major flaws.
Only Democratic states are currently signed up, but support could simply switch in the future if a Republican candidate faces winning the popular vote, but not the presidency.
The NPVC is a solution that would elect the president with the most votes without the difficulty of abolishing the Electoral College that is enshrined in the US constitution.
The current system is also vulnerable to distorted outcomes through actions such as gerrymandering. This practice involves precisely redrawing the borders of districts to concentrate support in favor of a party. The result is abnormally shaped districts that disenfranchise certain groups of voters.
Today, a constitutional amendment that would replace the Electoral College with a direct national popular vote is seen by many as the fairest electoral system.
“There is only one appropriate way to elect the president: Add up all the votes and declare the candidate receiving the most votes the winner,” Edwards said.
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