Happy Friday, dear Broadside readers. Thanks for staying with me another week.
The Electoral College will meet on Monday, December 14 and cast their votes for President and Vice President of the United States. With a lawsuit filed by Texas against Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin with the Supreme Court, it’s hard to tell exactly how the electors’ voting will play out as the suit makes its way through the system.
It wasn’t until recently that I understood the Electoral College and the role it plays in our presidential elections. If you’ve never studied it, let me provide you with a brief overview.
First, the Electoral College is not a physical place. It is a group of people—the “electors”—who make up the College. They are the ones who cast the votes for president and vice president.
“But wait!” you say. “I thought we voted for president and vice president.”
Well, we do—indirectly. When we vote in a presidential election, we mark our ballot for the person we want to be president. However, our vote does not go directly to the candidate we selected; it goes to the electors in our state. That vote tells the elector how the state should vote for president and vice president.
According to the system laid out by the Constitution, we are voting for 538 electors who are apportioned to each state based on 1) the number of congressional districts plus 2) two votes representing each state’s Senate seats. The number of electors each state gets is equal to its total number of members in Congress. There are 100 Senators and 435 Representatives. Washington DC also gets three electors.
435 + 100 + 3 = 538.
Below is the number of electors for each state (click to enlarge). A presidential candidate needs a simple majority of these electoral votes—270—to win the presidency.
After the popular vote is counted, the electors meet in their respective states and vote for President and Vice President. The candidate with the most votes wins all the electoral votes in each state (except in Nebraska and Maine, which split their electoral votes).
Why did our Founding Fathers create such a system? It was a compromise between those who wanted Congress to choose the president and those who wanted the president to be chosen by popular vote. Essentially, electors choose the president and we choose the electors.
And if the three ring circus playing out across the nation right now doesn’t yield a clear winner? The election of the president would go to the House of Representatives, and the election of the vice president would go to the Senate.
Each state would only have a single vote in the House, where Republicans control 26 state delegations and Democrats hold 23. If this election goes to the House and Senate, Trump wins four more years.
And with that happy thought, have a great weekend.