a brief history of the Electoral College and how it undermines the will of voters

For a fleeting moment in early October, it looked as if the US presidential electoral system might become an issue in this year's election. Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz told two audience members that the Electoral College should be abolished and replaced with a direct national popular vote.

Walz was quickly dismissed by Kamala Harris' campaign team with a brief statement that abolishing the Electoral College was not her official position. Walz duly retracted his comments and the story lasted less than 24 hours.

But the issue of the Electoral College could well come back to haunt the Harris campaign if this year's election produces another “runner-up” president – if the loser of the popular vote wins the electoral vote and thus the election.

If the race is as close as most polls suggest, this is a possible outcome. And Republican former President Donald Trump is more likely than Harris to be the beneficiary of this archaic, undemocratic electoral system.

This is how the Electoral College works

There is a two-stage, indirect election of the president under the electoral college system.

First, there will be a referendum in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia on November 5th to select “electors” who will officially cast the “electoral vote” in the so-called “Electoral College” on December 17th.

It is the electoral vote that decides the president, not the popular vote.

To complicate matters further, each state receives electoral votes based not on its population, but on its representation in the U.S. Congress.

Each state has at least one member of the House of Representatives and two members of the Senate, meaning that each state has at least three electoral votes regardless of its population.

There are 538 votes in the Electoral College, and an absolute majority of them – 270 or more – is required to win. The Constitution also contains a complex and highly undemocratic procedure in the event that no candidate achieves a majority in the electoral college. The House of Representatives would then decide on the election of the president, with each state delegation only having one vote.

The Origins of the Electoral College

It's no surprise that the Electoral College is an undemocratic institution – it was deliberately designed that way. The method of electing the president reflected a very conservative philosophy of government that was embodied by most of the framers of the Constitution when they met in Philadelphia in 1787.

The drafters strongly believed that the presidency should be an office above politics. They also believed that the choice should be made by those with knowledge, experience and understanding of government and statecraft.

Therefore, the framers opposed a popular vote for president because they feared it would lead to what one of the founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton, called “riot and disorder.” The drafters vehemently rejected direct democracy, preferring instead what they called a “republic.”

Their solution was to let state legislatures decide how to select each state's electors. In the beginning, most state legislatures chose electors to decide who became president—not the people.

The structure of the Electoral College—and its philosophical underpinnings—were then enshrined in the Constitution and purposefully designed to exclude the people from the process.

It has also been argued that race and slavery were integral to its design. By adopting the already agreed-upon compromise on representation in Congress and counting slaves as “three-fifths of all other persons,” the framers of the Constitution gave the major slave states far more influence, not only in Congress but also in electing the president.

In the longer term, the authors' efforts were not entirely successful, as two major political developments in the early 19th century forced some adaptation of the model.

As American borders expanded and political parties emerged, people began to demand a greater role in American democracy. This put pressure on state legislatures to give up their power to select electors and instead allow the popular vote for the Electoral College.

In the mid-19th century, the Electoral College functioned in much the same way as it does today.

Surprisingly, this did not require a constitutional amendment because the language of the Constitution gave states the flexibility to respond to the call for popular votes:

Each state appoints a number of electors in such manner as its legislature directs…

But that didn't change the fact that it was still the “voters” who elected the president, and not the people directly.

How the Electoral College distorts the popular vote

Election bias always distorts the popular vote by inflating the winner's margin of victory. In very close contests it may also compete against the popular vote, as it has done four times – in 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016.

Two mechanisms are responsible for this.

First, because of the guaranteed minimum of three electoral votes in the Electoral College, the populations of small states are overrepresented compared to larger states.

For example, Alaska, with three electoral votes, has one electoral vote for every 244,463 residents (based on 2020 U.S. Census data). In contrast, New York, with 28 electoral votes, has one electoral vote for every 721,473 residents. So an electoral vote in Alaska is worth almost three times as much as an electoral vote in New York.

Second, and far more significant, is the “winner takes all” agreement. In all states except Maine and Nebraska, the winner of the popular vote receives 100% of the electoral vote, no matter how close the contest.

Even in Maine and Nebraska, winner-takes-all applies, except that those states award two electoral votes to the statewide popular vote winner and one electoral vote to the popular vote winner in each of their congressional districts.

Also, few Americans are likely to be aware of how the winner-takes-all system works.

Put simply, when voters cast their ballots, they are effectively voting multiple times – once for each voter in the state who supports the presidential candidate of their choice. To do this, simply mark a box next to the name of your preferred candidate.

For example, if Harris defeats Trump in Pennsylvania by 51-49% of the popular vote, each of the 19 electors on Harris' list will defeat each of Trump's 19 electors by the same margin. The popular vote may have been close, but the election is 19-0 for Harris.

If this is repeated in all 50 states, Electoral College voter turnout will always have an inflated margin of victory compared to the popular vote.

In the 1992 presidential election, for example, Bill Clinton defeated George HW Bush in the Electoral College by a landslide of 370 votes to 168. However, Clinton was only 5.5 percentage points ahead of Bush in the popular vote (43% to 37.45%). Meanwhile, independent candidate Ross Perot received nearly 19% of the popular vote, but since he did not lead any states, he received zero electoral votes.

And when the loser of the popular vote wins the election, such as Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016, it shows that the total number of popular votes won by a candidate is less important than where those votes lie.

To win in the Electoral College, a candidate's vote must be distributed economically between states. In a majoritarian democracy (based on the principle of majority rule) this should not be a feature of the electoral system. But the U.S. presidential election process was never designed to work this way.

Ultimately, the electoral college also largely determines the type of election campaign. Most states in the US are “certain” wins for one party or the other.

Therefore, the candidates’ efforts are focused on the few competitive states – the so-called “battleground states”. The rest of the country tends to be ignored.

The Future of the Electoral College

That the Electoral College survives into the 21st century is due in part to the Constitution's adaptability to the earlier 19th-century challenge of selecting state electors, as well as the immense difficulty of amending the Constitution.

This is despite the fact that a clear majority of Americans support abolishing the Electoral College in favor of a national, direct popular vote for the presidency.

What will happen in this election remains unclear. Because the popular vote polls show such small differences in the battleground states, the outcome is not only unpredictable, it may even be random. And that is a terrible commentary on the state of American democracy.