It’s now been over a month since the 2024 Presidential Election and many people still aren’t sure what the Electoral College is and how it works. This is the key to actually putting the President in the White House, not the direct popular vote. It gives the state the right to decide its votes. This means that when a person votes it goes to their state’s official electors, not their candidate.  Each state has a different number of electoral votes based on population size. For example, here in California we have a population of almost 40 million people, so we get 54 Electoral Votes. These are both very large numbers compared to other states – not because California is a physically large state, but because we have an enormous population. Let’s look at Alaska, another big state that only has 3 electoral votes because its population is only about 700,000. But notice how the ratio of popular votes to electoral votes is not proportional. Alaska has one electoral vote per 230,000 citizens. California has one per 740,000 citizens. So if you live in a sparsely populated state, your vote counts far more than if you live in a highly populated state. And 48 states choose to allot ALL of their electoral votes to the candidate that wins its majority. The presidential candidate who has the most electoral votes in this winner-take-all system in each state wins the entire election. 

Some may argue that this system of voting isn’t fair because even if the candidate has the larger popular vote nationally directly from the people (the exact number of popular votes each candidate gets), they can still lose because they don’t have a majority of the electoral votes. A recent example of this was during the 2016 election between Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump. Hilary Clinton won the popular vote by over four million votes but Donald Trump had more electoral votes so he won the election. This system is extremely difficult to change since it’ll require an amendment to the Constitution, a complicated process. The Electoral College was created by the Founding Fathers because giving small states a disproportionately large vote was the only way to get those states to join the United States under a strong, centralized government. That’s why they felt they had to put it into the Constitution even though it could undermine true democracy and felt like a throwback to medieval times when lords had so much power. We should note the Electoral College has only conflicted with the popular vote in five elections in all of US history (1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016, and those were close) so it usually is not controversial, as in last month’s election in which Trump won both the popular vote and the electoral vote. Still, the larger the US voting system gets, the more potential there is for the Electoral College to frustrate majorities, like in the Senate, but that’s a story for another article.