Electoral College

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Electoral College exists because the delegates who wrote the United States Constitution in 1787 could not agree on any more direct way to choose a president. A popular national vote was proposed and rejected, partly because delegates from smaller and slaveholding states worried it would let more populous states dominate every election, and partly because many delegates simply distrusted the judgment of a mass electorate operating without modern communication across a large, disconnected country. Direct election by Congress was proposed and rejected too, on the opposite worry that it would make the presidency dependent on legislative favor rather than a genuinely separate branch of government. What emerged was a compromise that satisfied no faction completely: each state would appoint a number of electors equal to its total representation in Congress, senators plus representatives, who would then cast the actual votes for president in their state capitals. The arrangement folded in the same three fifths compromise used for congressional apportionment, which meant that enslaved populations, who could not vote, still increased the elector counts, and therefore the political power, of the states that held them. Since ratification the system has been amended once in a fundamental way, the Twelfth Amendment of 1804, which separated the ballot for president from the ballot for vice president after the flawed 1800 election exposed a design flaw in the original process. Today's total of 538 electors, requiring 270 to win, is arrived at the same basic way the framers set out, a mechanism built as a hurried compromise between rival visions of democracy that neither side of the debate had fully won.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

An American presidential candidate can lose the national popular vote and still win the presidency, a possibility built directly into how the Electoral College allocates power among states rather than counting every vote as equal nationwide. It has happened five times in American history, most recently in 2000 and 2016, and each occurrence has renewed a debate over whether the system still serves its original purpose. Public opinion on the question has shifted markedly: survey research from the Pew Research Center has found roughly two thirds of American adults favoring a switch to a national popular vote system over the current arrangement. Reform proposals generally split into two approaches. One is a constitutional amendment abolishing the Electoral College outright, a route requiring supermajorities in Congress and among the states that has never come close to succeeding. The other, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, tries to reach the same outcome without amending the Constitution at all: participating states agree in advance to award all of their electors to whichever candidate wins the national popular vote, once enough states holding a majority of electoral votes, 270, have joined the compact, which would make the popular vote winner the presidential winner in practice even though the Electoral College mechanism itself remains untouched on paper. Defenders of the existing system argue it forces candidates to build broad, geographically distributed coalitions rather than campaigning only in the country's biggest population centers, a version of the same argument the framers made in 1787 about not letting the most populous states dominate every contest. Both sides of the argument, in other words, are still fighting over the same basic tension the delegates in Philadelphia never fully resolved.