Every four years, Americans cast ballots for president, but the winner is not determined by adding up all the votes nationwide. Under the Constitution, the presidency is decided by electors, and the number a candidate needs is not a share of the popular vote but a majority of those electors. The arrangement is old, often misunderstood and regularly debated.
This article explains how the system works and summarizes arguments made by supporters and critics. It does not take a side.
How many electors there are, and how they are divided?
There are 538 electors. Each state gets a number of electors equal to its total representation in Congress: its number of House members plus its two senators. The District of Columbia, which has no voting members of Congress, receives three electors under the 23rd Amendment. A candidate needs a majority, which is 270, to win.
Because House seats are reapportioned after each census, the electoral map shifts every ten years. A state that gains population may gain seats and therefore electors, which is one reason the census has consequences for presidential elections.
What happens on Election Day
When people vote for a presidential ticket, they are in practice choosing a slate of electors pledged to that ticket. Almost every state uses a “winner-take-all” rule: the ticket that wins the most votes in the state gets all of its electors. Two states, Maine and Nebraska, use a different method, awarding two electors to the statewide winner and one to the winner of each congressional district.
The Constitution leaves it to the state legislatures to decide how electors are chosen, and since the 19th century states have chosen them by popular vote. The rules for counting and certifying the vote are set at the state level, as described in who runs elections in the United States.
After the vote
The process continues for weeks:
- State certification. States count and certify their results, and the governor prepares a certificate listing the winning electors.
- Meeting of the electors. In mid-December, the electors meet in their own states and cast their votes.
- Congress counts. In early January, the House and Senate meet in a joint session, presided over by the Vice President, to count the electoral votes. After the 2020 election, Congress passed the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, which clarified that the Vice President’s role is ceremonial and raised the threshold for objections: an objection to a state’s electors now requires the support of one-fifth of the members of each chamber.
- Inauguration. The new term begins at noon on January 20.
Faithless electors
A “faithless elector” is one who votes for someone other than the candidate they were pledged to support. They are rare and have never changed the outcome of an election. In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Chiafalo v. Washington that states may require electors to honor their pledges and may penalize or replace those who do not.
What if no one gets 270?
Under the 12th Amendment, if no candidate has a majority, the House of Representatives chooses the president from among the top three electoral vote recipients, with each state delegation casting a single vote. The Senate chooses the Vice President from the top two. This “contingent election” has happened twice in the nation’s history, in 1800 and 1824.
The arguments for and against
People who defend the Electoral College generally make the following points:
- It encourages candidates to build broad coalitions across many states, not just in population centers.
- It gives smaller states some weight and reflects the federal structure of the country.
- It tends to produce clear winners and limits the scope of recounts to individual states.
Critics make these points:
- A candidate can win the presidency while losing the national popular vote, which has happened five times, most recently in 2016.
- Campaigns concentrate on a limited number of closely contested states, and voters elsewhere get less attention.
- A vote in one state can carry different weight than a vote in another because of how electors are allotted.
People on different parts of the political spectrum have held each of these views at different times.
Changing the system
A constitutional amendment would require two-thirds of both chambers of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states. A different approach, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, would have participating states award their electors to the national popular vote winner, but it takes effect only once states representing a majority of electoral votes join. It has been adopted by a number of states, but it has not reached that threshold, and its legal status remains debated.
Where polls fit in
Election forecasts are often built from state-level polls, since the winner is decided state by state, and national polling can be misleading about the likely electoral outcome. Understanding how polls work and what the margin of error means helps in reading those numbers. For the official record, the National Archives publishes the electoral vote certificates and the full results of each election.
Sources: U.S. Constitution; National Archives and Records Administration; Congressional Research Service; U.S. Supreme Court; Federal Election Commission
