Here’s a little factual nugget that never fails to baffle:

American voters do not directly elect the president.

Yes, you read that correctly: The U.S. president is not chosen through a one-person, one-vote system of direct democracy.

When voters fill out their ballots in this tightly contested (and seemingly never ending) presidential election, they’re not actually voting for any one person. Instead, they’re throwing their support behind a group of “electors” who belong to a curious institution called the Electoral College – a mysterious group of 538 members who directly cast the votes that actually determine who the next president will be. The threshold to win: 270 electoral votes.

Don’t believe me? Check out Article II, Section I of the U.S. Constitution. Says it right there. Honest.

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Keep reading for everything you need to know about the Electoral College. And if you’re looking for information about what’s on your ballot, take a look at KQED’s Voter Guide, which unpacks ballot measures and compares candidates in every race in the Bay Area.

So, what is this Electoral College?

Every four years, during presidential elections, state political parties each appoint a group of “electors.” They are usually committed party activists who have pledged to support whichever party candidate has won the state’s popular vote.

In other words, if “Democratic Candidate A” got the most votes from California voters, then each of the Democratic electors from California would, in turn, be expected to throw their support behind that candidate in the Electoral College vote.

(Note that it doesn’t always play out that smoothly – more on that later.)

How many electors does each state get?

It’s based on a simple equation: each state’s total number of congressional representatives plus its two senators.[aside label=”From the 2024 Voter Guide” link1=’https://www.kqed.org/voterguide/president,Learn about the U.S. Presidential Election’ hero=https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/80/2024/09/Aside-Presidential-2024-General-Election-1200×1200-1.png]Every state (and Washington, D.C.) is guaranteed at least three electoral votes. So a sparsely populated state like North Dakota – which has two senators but only one congressional representative – gets just three electoral votes. Meanwhile, crowded California – the most populous state – gets 54 electoral votes, based on its 52 congressional representatives and two senators.

Interestingly, California actually has one fewer electoral vote than it did in the 2020 presidential election. That’s because the state lost one of its House seats following the release of 2020 Census results, which showed a slight decline in the state’s population.

And then you have the U.S territories. Controversially, the more than 4 million people living in places like Puerto Rico and Guam get no electors at all. So even though most of them are U.S. citizens and can participate in their party’s presidential primaries, they have no influence in the general election.

How does a presidential candidate win electors?

The presidential election is a grueling state-by-state battle, and in nearly every one of those states, it’s a winner-take-all scenario. That means the candidate who receives the most popular votes (a plurality) in each state gets all that state’s Republican or Democratic electors.

That means that even if your candidate loses the popular vote by even a single vote, they walk away completely empty handed.

So purely hypothetically: If Donald Trump were to very narrowly beat Kamala Harris in a swing state like Michigan – let’s say by 500 votes – he would get all 15 of that state’s electors … and she wouldn’t get any.

As if this wasn’t complicated enough, there are actually two states that follow different rules. Maine and Nebraska use a proportional system, in which two electors go to the candidate that wins the state’s popular vote and the remaining electors are decided by popular vote within each congressional district.

In most previous presidential elections, the electoral process in these two small states has been largely overlooked. But in a presidential race as agonizingly close as this one, that unique electoral calculus could potentially tip the balance. That’s because unlike most of solidly Republican Nebraska, its Second Congressional District – which includes Omaha – is considered a “swing district,” meaning it could go either way in terms of which candidate the majority of its voters choose. And that single electoral vote may be enough to give one of the candidates the 270 electoral votes they need to move into the White House.

Why is 270 the magic Electoral College number to win the presidential race?

There are 538 electors nationwide, and to win the presidency, a candidate needs half of them (269) plus one – hence the 270.

So, if a candidate wins a state like California (even by a single measly vote), they’ve just secured 20% of the electoral votes needed to be sitting pretty in the White House come January.

And that’s why on the campaign trail, the candidates generally don’t spend too much time in relatively small states where electors are scarce (with Nebraska as the big exception). You also usually won’t find them spending too much time campaigning in big but generally politically predictable states like Democratic-leaning California or New York or Republican-leaning Texas or Florida – even though the latter was a prized swing state not too long ago.

It’s the big swing states (a.k.a. the battleground states) – like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona – that they’re spending most of their time in, trying hard to win over undecided voters. These are the states that are still up for grabs and chock full of electors; the ones that will almost definitely decide the election.

The site 270 To Win provides good interactive maps that let you simulate different outcomes. It also shows state-by-state breakdowns and results from previous presidential elections.

https://youtu.be/hlQE4IGFc5A?si=jpb5uHKjlk4hdRvC

But what if neither candidate gets to 270 Electoral College votes?

The chances of this happening are incredibly slim.

But if it did, the House of Representatives would elect the next president from a pool of the three candidates who received the most electoral votes. Each state delegation has one vote.

The Senate would then elect the vice president, with all 100 senators each casting one vote.

This has only happened once before. In the 1824 presidential election, Andrew Jackson won the most popular vote and led the pack in electoral votes. But because it was a competitive race among four candidates, Jackson fell short of winning the requisite electoral majority. Congress decided the outcome, and ultimately elected Jackson’s rival, John Quincy Adams. Trivial Pursuit, anyone?

When do electors cast their official votes?

Oddly, it’s not until about a month after Election Day.

On the Monday following the second Wednesday of December (stay with me here), each state’s electors meet in their respective state capitals and cast their votes – one for president, and one for vice president.

These events don’t usually get a whole lot of attention because everyone already knows that those electors are almost certainly going to vote for the candidate in their own party.

Technically, electors can change their minds, but it’s only happened a handful of times. These electors are labeled “faithless electors.”

Several weeks later, a joint session of Congress meets to officially count the electoral votes and announce the winner. This process is presided over by the vice president, in his or her role as president of the Senate, who then announces the official winner. This whole process is largely ceremonial, the outcome a foregone conclusion.

However, in 2020, as you may remember, things got pretty crazy when a mob of pro-Trump supporters stormed the halls of Congress on Jan. 6, in a Hail Mary attempt to stop legislators and Vice President Mike Pence from counting and affirming the results. Things got ugly fast, resulting in the multiple deaths, including one rioter – an Air Force veteran – who was shot by Capitol Police as she tried to breach the House chamber, along with three police officers (one who was attacked by the mob and two who took their own lives afterward).

Needless to say, the congressional electoral-count process was postponed and taken back up again the following day, with Pence affirming Joe Biden’s victory. This time around, Congress is scheduled to count the electoral votes on the same day: Jan. 6, 2025.

This is really confusing. How about a real example?

Fine! Let’s look back at the historic 2008 election when Democrat Barack Obama handily defeated Republican John McCain. First off, in terms of electoral votes, Obama killed it – he ended up with more than twice what John McCain had: 365 to 173.

But Obama won the election by less than 10 million popular votes. Why? Because he was able to squeak out wins in the big critical swing states (including, at the time: Pennsylvania, Florida and Ohio), amassing all of those electoral votes.

Can a candidate win the presidency without winning the popular vote?

Indeed they can.

This has actually occurred five different times: In 1876 and 1888, Rutherford B. Hayes and Benjamin Harrison, respectively, won the White House even though they lost the popular vote (but won the electoral vote). There was also that strange aforementioned 1824 election, decided by the U.S. House of Representatives, which handed the presidency to John Quincy Adams over Andrew Jackson.

And then there was the infamous 2000 election, ultimately decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, in which Democrat Al Gore won more popular votes than George W. Bush, but came up short on electoral votes following a controversial Florida recount. Guess who then became a staunch advocate for getting rid of the Electoral College?

Most recently was the 2016 presidential election. Democrat Hillary Clinton got nearly 3 million more popular votes than Republican Donald Trump, but still lost the race.

That’s because Trump won a decisive victory in the Electoral College, with 306 pledged electors, based on the 30 states he carried. He did that by not only winning Florida, Iowa and Ohio (which were still considered solid swing states at the time), but also flipping Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – states that have historically voted Democrat, and that pundits love to refer to as the “Blue Wall.”

Why did the founders come up with such a zany system?

Three main reasons:

1. They sought to steer clear of the British parliamentary model, in which the chief executive (prime minister) is chosen by elected representatives of the majority party. The founders thought that it was more democratic to appoint electors from each state than to have a system in which the president was elected by Congress. Of course, the irony with this logic is that in 1787, only white, landholding men could vote. Not very democratic.

2. It came down to an issue of old-school logistics: Back in the day, long distance communication and travel was, to put it mildly, a challenge. Voting for delegates at a local level was easier and less susceptible to tampering and corruption than was counting every last person’s vote across the whole country.What are some of the arguments for keeping the Electoral College?

3. The slavery issue: Back in 1787, as the Founders wrestled over the question of apportionment, the Southern states demanded that enslaved people be included in the general population count, even though they were considered chattel. That’s because the bigger a state’s population, the more representation it would get in Congress and the more federal money it would receive.

At the time, a large majority of the nation’s fledgling citizenry lived in northern cities like Philadelphia and Boston, dwarfing the white population of the agrarian South. To give the South more influence, James Madison and other influential slave-holding members of the Constitutional Convention advocated for counting slaves, who made up an estimated 40% of the South’s population.

As Michael Klarman, a Harvard Law School professor, explains in “The Framer’s Coup,” the framers “rejected direct election of the president mostly because they distrusted the people and because Southern slaves would not count in a direct vote.”

As part of the “compromise,” the framers determined that each slave would be counted as three-fifths of a person, a major power grab for Southern states, guaranteeing they would have a much stronger national influence. For more on this, check out this episode of Throughline, NPR’s history podcast.

What are some arguments for keeping the Electoral College?

It’s intended to make candidates pay at least some attention to less-populated states and rural regions (whose electors can add up) rather than focusing entirely on voter-rich urban centers.
It avoids the need for a nationwide recount in the event of a very close race.
It’s consistent with America’s representative system of government.
It’s in our Constitution and what our founders wanted – so just leave it be!

And how about against?

Ever since the Founders concocted the Electoral College nearly 240 years ago, there have been hundreds of ultimately unsuccessful attempts to abolish or reform what many consider an inherently flawed system. But one effort came pretty darn close: In 1969, the year after a chaotic presidential election, the House overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment to abolish it altogether. But it ultimately died in the Senate after a group of segregationist Southern senators blocked it from moving forward with a filibuster.

Here are just some of the reasons many people want to get rid of it:

Under our current electoral system, not all votes are created equal. One vote in a swing state or less populous state matters more than a vote in a larger Democratic or Republican leaning state. In a direct democracy, everyone’s vote should have the same weight, regardless of geography.
It encourages candidates to focus their campaigns largely in swing states while often ignoring the millions of voters in more populous states that tend to predictably favor one party.
It’s a super-outdated system that does not reflect the will of the people, enabling a candidate to win the presidency despite losing the popular vote – sometimes by millions of votes.
Because it’s a system that was originally designed to benefit slaveholders, and is so deeply rooted in that shameful legacy.

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An earlier version of this story originally published in Oct., 2016.

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