What is the electoral college?

The US presidential election will take place on November 5. But it is possible that the candidate with the most votes will not win.

Indeed, the president is not chosen directly by the voters, but by what is called the electoral college.

When Americans go to the polls in presidential elections, they are actually voting for a group of officials who make up the electoral college.

The word “college” here simply refers to a group of people sharing a shared task. These people are voters and their job is to choose the president and vice president.

The electoral college meets every four years, a few weeks after Election Day, to accomplish this task.

Each state’s number of electors roughly corresponds to the size of its population. Each state has as many electors as it has legislators in the U.S. Congress (the House and Senate).

California has the largest number of electors – 54 – while a handful of sparsely populated states like Wyoming, Alaska and North Dakota (and Washington DC) have the minimum of three.

There are 538 voters in total.

Each elector represents one electoral vote, and a candidate must receive a majority of votes – 270 or more – to win the presidency.

Typically, states award all of their Electoral College votes to whoever won the vote among the state’s ordinary voters.

For example, if a candidate wins 50.1% of the vote in Texas, he or she receives all of the state’s 40 electoral votes. Alternatively, a candidate could win by a landslide while receiving the same number of electoral votes.

It is therefore possible for a candidate to become president by winning a number of close races in certain states, even if he or she has fewer votes nationwide.

Only two states (Maine and Nebraska) distribute their electoral college votes based on the proportion of votes received by each candidate.

Most states consistently vote for the same party in every election. This is why presidential candidates target specific “swing states” – states where the vote can go one way or the other – rather than trying to win over as many voters as possible. across the country.

Each state won brings them closer to the 270 electoral college votes they need.

Yes. In fact, two of the last six elections were won by candidates who received fewer votes from the general public than their rivals.

It’s possible for candidates to be the most popular among voters nationally, but still fail to win enough states to get 270 electoral votes.

In 2016, Donald Trump received nearly three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, but won the presidency because the Electoral College gave him a majority.

In 2000, George W. Bush won with 271 electoral votes, although Democratic candidate Al Gore won the popular vote by more than half a million.

Only three other presidents have been elected without winning the popular vote, all in the 19th century: John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B Hayes, and Benjamin Harrison.

When the US Constitution was being drafted in 1787, a national popular vote to elect a president was virtually impossible (the size of the country and delicate communications).

So the framers of the Constitution created the Electoral College, with each state choosing its electors.

Small states favored this system because it gave them more votes than a nationwide popular vote to decide the president.

The electoral college was also favored by the Southern states, where slaves made up a large portion of the population. Even though slaves did not vote, they were counted in the U.S. census (as three-fifths of a person).

Because the number of electoral votes was determined by the size of a state’s population, Southern states had more influence in electing a president than a direct public vote would have given them.

In some states, voters could vote for the candidate of their choice, regardless of voter support. But in practice, voters almost always vote for the candidate who wins the most votes in their state.

If an elector votes against his state’s presidential choice, he is called an “infidel.” In 2016, seven Electoral College votes were cast this way, but no results were altered by faithless electors.

In some states, “faithless” voters can be fined or prosecuted for voting or abstaining.

In 2020, American voters became familiar with the concept of “fake voters” after pro-Trump Republicans in seven US states created their own electors in an attempt to overturn the election results.

In some cases, they created and signed official-looking documents or arrived at state capitols on Dec. 14, when voters across the country gathered to formally cast their ballots.

Some of those involved have been prosecuted and investigations are still ongoing.

Federal prosecutors later described the effort as a “corrupt plan to subvert the function of the federal government by preventing the counting and certification of Biden electors’ votes.”

The House of Representatives, the lower house of U.S. lawmakers, will then vote to elect the president.

This has only happened once, when in 1824 four candidates split the electoral vote, depriving each of them of a majority.

With two dominant parties in the American system, this is unlikely to happen today.