What is the U.S. Electoral College? America’s path to the presidency, explained

In less than two months, Americans will go to the polls to choose their next president. But the process that translates those millions of votes into one seat in the Oval Office is much more complicated than a straight tally.

As U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump criss-cross the country’s most contentious states in the weeks, days and hours until polls close, here’s everything you need to know about the United States Electoral College, a slate of representatives who together cast the all-important ballots to decide the fate of the White House.

What is the Electoral College?

As established by the United States Constitution, the Electoral College is a formal process by which individual Americans’ votes are represented in U.S. presidential elections.

Unlike in elections for mayors, governors or members of Congress, which are typically decided by comparing the total number of votes for each candidate, known as the popular vote, the winner of the presidency (and vice-presidency) is chosen each cycle by just 538 votes spread across the country, cast by representatives appointed by their state’s government.

These representatives are known as “electors.”

In the hours and days following election day, as individual counties complete their vote counts, state governments call upon their electors to cast their votes for the candidate who won their state, in most cases, on a winner-take-all basis.

Notable exceptions include the states of Maine and Nebraska, where instead of awarding all of their elector votes to a single candidate, elector totals are instead split based on the proportion of votes won by each candidate within their states.

To win a U.S. presidential election, a candidate needs to capture a majority of 270 or more electoral college votes. Once those votes have been cast and tallied and a winner determined, they are certified by a joint session of the United States Congress, officially declaring the election’s winner as the next American commander-in-chief.

As with the most recent presidential election, this year’s Electoral College votes will be certified by Congress at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, next year.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Vice-President Mike Pence officiate as a joint session of the House and Senate reconvenes to confirm the Electoral College votes at the Capitol, Wednesday, Jan 6, 2021. (Erin Schaff/The New York Times via AP, Pool)

How are Electoral College votes distributed?

Each U.S. state is allocated the same number of electors as they have members of Congress, which includes two senators per state and a number of House representatives (also known as congressmen or congresswomen), proportionate to the state’s population.

California leads the nation in electors, with 54, followed by Texas, with 40, Florida, with 30 and New York state, with 28. Elector totals are re-allocated after each U.S. Census to account for growth and decline in individual state populations.

In addition to the 50 states, the Electoral College allocates extra elector slots to the nation’s capital, Washington D.C., despite the city’s lack of voting members in Congress. D.C. is tied with Alaska, Delaware, Wyoming, Vermont and the Dakotas for fewest electors in the nation, with three apiece.

How are the electors chosen?

The original text of the Constitution doesn’t specify many eligibility requirements for electors, except that sitting members of Congress or anyone holding an “office of trust or profit” under the United States are prohibited from participating.

Following the American Civil War, an amendment to the Constitution added that state officials who had participated in an insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or lended support to enemies of the nation, were disqualified as prospective electors.

It’s left up to the individual states to decide who to appoint as their electors, but those taking up the role are traditionally prominent or longtime figures in state political parties.

On election day, political parties stand ready with their slates of potential electors, typically nominated at their respective party conventions, earlier in the year. As the votes come in and a winning presidential candidate is determined for the state, their party’s electors are appointed as the state’s representatives in the Electoral College.

As mentioned above, Maine and Nebraska operate under a slightly different system, where instead of appointing all of their electors from the winning party, they split their slate between parties in proportion to how the state voted in presidential and congressional races.

Recently, Republicans including Trump ally and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham have lobbied to bring Nebraska into the fold of winner-take-all states. While it has long been a Republican stronghold, Democrats have managed to peel off one Nebraska college vote in two of the past four elections; once in 2008, and again in 2020.

“Trump’s going to win the state by 20 points,” Graham told ABC News in an interview Thursday.

“This may come down to a single electoral vote.” 

What can we expect for the Electoral College in 2024’s election?

Although each of the 538 electors from coast to coast are technically up for grabs this year, prevailing wisdom holds that all but a short list of battleground states can be fairly predicted ahead of time, due to how deep the margins are for one candidate or the other.

Where the race will likely be won and lost, though, are the swing states: Those with thin margins and a deluge of campaign appearances, targeted advertising and nail-biting press coverage hitting them from now until election day.

As forecasted by 270toWin, a nonpartisan U.S. polling aggregator, states that are too close to predict include Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

Highlighted in this map are the expected swing states for the 2024 U.S. presidential election (CTV News).

Together, this cycle’s swing states make up 93 electoral votes. As for the remainder, Kamala Harris is expected to take home 226 votes across states that either lean toward or safely favour her ticket. Trump, meanwhile, holds 219 leaning, likely or near-certain electoral votes.

Among the seven identified toss-ups, though, Pennsylvania may prove to be the most pivotal. In 10 of the 20 scenarios where Democrats capture enough states to win, Pennsylvania is one of those states. For Republicans, Pennsylvania is required for 15 of their 21 winning scenarios, according to 270ToWin.

That’s not to say that there are never upsets, though. In 2016, Donald Trump flipped six states to win the presidency, including the Democrats’ historical “blue wall” strongholds of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Arizona, meanwhile, is one of the country’s newest swing states, after decades of near-uninterrupted Republican leanings that have since eroded to the point of a 2020 win for U.S. President Joe Biden, a Democrat.

If the 2020 election is any indicator, exceedingly thin margins could mean that the process of counting votes and calling states — those with the closest races, especially — could last well past election day on Nov. 5.

And what’s more, the distribution of college votes means that the fate of a country with one-third of a billion residents will, by most accounts, be decided by just tens or hundreds of thousands of voters, spread across a scattered list of counties in just seven of the 50 states.

What if there’s a tie?

In the unlikely event that neither candidate wins, such as in a 269-269 tie, the decision of who wins the presidency is handed over to the U.S. House of Representatives, who cast one vote per state, as decided by each state’s delegation of congresspersons amongst themselves.

How that would play out is a kind of prediction on top of a prediction, though, as all 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives are up for re-election in November as well. Republicans currently control the House with 220 members to Democrats’ 211 (plus four vacancies), and a majority of states have more Republicans in Congress than Democrats, but there’s no telling just what that seat count will look like on the other end of the race.

The last time a U.S. election has fallen to Congress’s final say was John Quincy Adams’ electoral win in 1824, exactly 200 years ago.

North Carolina elector Thomas William Hill prepares to sign Electoral College votes for then-president Donald Trump and vice president Mike Pence in the house chambers of the Old State Capitol building in Raleigh, N.C., Monday, Dec. 14, 2020. (Julie Wall/The News & Observer via AP)

What about the popular vote?

Five times in U.S. history, the winner of a presidential election was not the candidate who got the most individual votes, nationwide. This is because elections are won on a state-by-state basis, and (in most cases) even if, as the U.S. National Archives puts it, only 50.1 per cent of an individual state’s voters chose the winning candidate, that person still gets 100 per cent of the state’s Electoral College votes.

While most of these instances happened in the 1800s, the two still-living former presidential candidates who won the popular vote, but not the presidency, are former U.S. vice president Al Gore in 2000 and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Why does the Electoral College exist?

According to the National Archives, the Electoral College was created as a sort of compromise between two competing methods to elect presidents: Either through the popular vote, or through a vote by the U.S. Congress.

One common argument in favour of the College is that it tips the electoral scales toward smaller states, such as Wyoming and Alaska, and away from the most populous states, such as California and Texas. Because every state gets two senators (and by extension, two electors) regardless of population, those with fewer people get a bump in electoral weight per citizen, while the opposite is true for the most populous.

Proponents say that this helps protect the rights and influence of the Montanas and Idahos of the world from their more powerful neighbours, but many, including some sitting U.S. officials, have worked for years to fight that so-called small-state advantage.

National Archives analysis shows some 700 congressional proposals to modify or abolish the Electoral College system over the past two centuries, and cites an opinion by the American Bar Association calling the process “archaic,” and “ambiguous.”

One 2023 poll by Pew Research Center found that 65 per cent of surveyed U.S. adults were in favour of replacing the Electoral College with a popular-vote system, maintaining a majority opinion that’s lasted since as far back as 2000.

But because the foundation of the College is enshrined in the United States’ founding document, it would require a Constitutional amendment to bring it to an end, an undertaking described by the White House itself as “quite onerous,” and that would require the support of two-thirds of both houses of Congress, or two-thirds of all state governments, just to propose.

In a legislative branch as divided as that of the modern day United States, such a titanic shift toward bipartisan consensus is very unlikely. Absent that, some states have conspired to redirect the Electoral College’s power, rather than undo it entirely.

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPV) is a state-level agreement that would require electors to cast their College votes based on the popular vote of the country as a whole, in essence, transitioning the U.S. electoral system to the popular vote without the need for a constitutional amendment.

Thus far, 17 states and the District of Columbia have passed NPV into law, but the agreement is designed to activate only after it has been adopted by enough states to command 270 electoral votes, or enough to decide an election. At the time of this writing, NPV jurisdictions together control 209 votes.

“Whoever gets the most votes, wins,” Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland said of the interstate compact in a video hosted by the YouTube page for National Popular Vote!, a non-profit advocacy group.

“It’s not that complicated an idea.” 

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., right, sits on the House panel investigating the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection, at the Capitol in Washington, Monday, Dec. 13, 2021. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)