When all the votes are tabulated on election night, the winner of the presidential race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump might not be the candidate with the most votes. In fact, there’s a good chance it won’t be.
In two of the last six elections, the winner of the popular vote watched someone else be inaugurated as president the following January. In 2000, Al Gore received over 500,000 more votes than George W. Bush nationally but lost an electoral count that came down to 537 votes in Florida. In 2016, Hillary Clinton attained nearly three million more votes than Donald Trump but lost the Electoral College 306-232, due to losing by slim margins in multiple swing states.
These seeming anomalies are the product of the United States’ use of the Electoral College. Though the president and vice president are the only elected officials in the United States who represent a national constituency, they are not selected via a national popular vote. Rather, the U.S. employs a process through which citizens indirectly elect a president on a state-by-state basis.
The American system is unique. Only a few other countries around the world—including Germany and Pakistan—use variants of an electoral college, but these countries operate systems in which the real power rests in the hands of a prime minister or chancellor. It’s this uniqueness that makes the American Electoral College the subject of frequent debate and, sometimes, exasperation. To understand this exasperation, we must weigh past considerations, present realities, and future prospects.
Like all the institutions established by the Constitution, the Electoral College was a product of compromise at the Philadelphia Convention of 1787. Rather than undermine the separation of powers by enabling Congress to choose the executive or expose the country to the dangers of demagoguery by placing the vote in the hands of the public, the Framers chose to create an alternative method.
Each state is allocated a number of electors equal to its number of representatives in the U.S. House plus its two U.S. senators. The total number of electoral votes is currently 538 (equal to the 535 members of the House and Senate plus the 3 electors granted to Washington, DC), and a candidate must reach 270 (a simple majority) to be declared the winner. Aside from Maine and Nebraska, which allocate some electors based on their U.S. House districts, a process that affects just five electoral votes, a candidate needs to defeat their opponent by just a single vote among the people to take all of that state’s electors.
The winner-take-all approach is one of the main criticisms of the Electoral College, as it renders millions of votes meaningless, including those of the six million Trump voters in California in 2020 or the five million Biden voters in Texas that year. This system also incentivizes selectively using campaign time and resources on swing states—those in which the popular vote is expected to be close—and ignoring those in which one party has a clear majority of voters.
Supporters of the current system emphasize its importance in maintaining a vision of federalism defined by the primacy of the states. They stress that the system forces candidates to appeal to multiple states and regions and that it enhances the ability of the people in less-populated states to have an impact on the selection of the president, while they might be ignored altogether in a national popular vote. Some also suggest that the Electoral College makes it easier to deal with close elections or balloting issues, as recounts can be focused on particular states rather than needing to be conducted nationwide.
However, this line of argument assumes electors are allocated proportionally among the states by population, which they are not. The House of Representatives has not been truly proportional for over a century, when its number of seats was fixed at 435. Every state is guaranteed one representative, so proportional ratios are rendered impossible when some states grow at faster rates than others.
On top of that, each state is guaranteed two senators, regardless of population. The lowest-population state, Wyoming, has three electors for its 580,000 residents, and California has 54 electors for its 39 million residents. California has just 18 times the electors of Wyoming, despite having a population that is 67 times larger. So, while the Electoral College was intended to protect smaller states, it actually quite clearly overrepresents their residents—who are often much less racially and ethnically diverse than the nation as a whole—at the expense of people living in larger states.
To address these issues, reformers have floated several alternative plans over the years. One is a simple national popular vote. In 1969, a constitutional amendment proposing this passed the House and was supported by both parties and the sitting president, Richard Nixon. It was filibustered in the Senate and failed to advance.
There is also the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, in which states would pledge to allocate their electors to the candidate that received a plurality of the national popular vote. This agreement is slated to go into effect when it has been adopted by enough states to secure a majority of electoral votes, but it is currently 61 electors short of that number.
Finally, the states could change their methods of allocation from winner-take-all to proportional or district-based systems, which would allow for parties that are in the minority statewide to at least secure some electors, but the latter system would be subject to gerrymandering problems.
All told, the current system is unlikely to change any time soon. Amending the Constitution requires the agreement of two-thirds of the House and two-thirds of the Senate, plus ratification by three-fourths of the states. Republicans are currently advantaged by the system, as they enjoy majorities of voters in many of the smaller, more rural states, while Democrats are often able to pad their national numbers in highly-populated liberal-leaning states like California and New York.
Further, there is little incentive for states to voluntarily adopt proportional allocation or tie their electors to the national popular vote without a commitment that other states would do so. Thus, the system persists, and we can look forward to seeing more focus groups in Pennsylvania diners for at least the next few elections.