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The United States Electoral College is the official name of the group of Presidential Electors who are chosen every four years to cast the electoral vote and thereby elect the President and Vice President of the United States. The "electoral college" was established by Article Two, Section One of the United States Constitution, which provides for a quadrennial election of Presidential Electors in each state. The electoral process was modified in 1804 with the ratification of the 12th Amendment and again in 1961 with the ratification of the 23rd Amendment.
The Electoral College is administered at the national level by the National Archives and Records Administration via its Office of the Federal Register. The actual meetings of electors in each state are administered by state officials.
The present allotment of electors by state is shown in the article List of U.S. states by population.
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Electoral College mechanics
Election of President of the United States and Vice President of the United States is indirect. Presidential Electors are chosen by the popular vote every four years on Election Day. Although ballots list the names of the presidential candidates, voters within the 50 states and the District of Columbia are actually choosing Electors when they vote for President and Vice President. These Presidential Electors in turn cast the official (electoral) votes for those two offices.
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Apportionment of Electors
Beginning with the election of 1964, a commensurate number of people to the number of Electoral Votes have been elected in each presidential election to cast the electoral vote. Each state has as many Electors as it has Representatives and Senators. The most populous state, California, has 55 Electors, followed by Texas (34) and New York (31). The smallest states by population, Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming have three Electors each. Because the number of representatives for each state is determined decennially by the United States Census, the electoral votes for each state are also determined by the Census every ten years. The number of Electors is equal to the total membership of both houses of Congress, plus additional Electors allocated to the District of Columbia. There are currently 100 Senators and 435 Members of the House of Representatives, so the total membership of both houses of Congress is 535. There are currently 3 Electors allocated to the District of Columbia, so the total number of Electors is 538. Therefore, in order to win the Presidency, it is necessary for the successful candidate to gain 270 electoral votes (a majority of 538).
Under the 23rd Amendment, the District of Columbia is allocated as many Electors as it would have if it were a state, except that it cannot have more Electors than the least populous state. The least populous state (currently Wyoming) has 3 Electors, so the District cannot have more than 3 Electors. If the least populous state had 4 Electors, however, the District would be entitled to a maximum of 4 Electors.
It has been argued by advocates for statehood for the District that Wyoming has a smaller population than Washington, D.C. and therefore deserves fewer electors. However, opponents note that Houston, Texas, New York City, and Los Angeles, California each have vastly greater populations than Washington, D.C. and no electoral votes at all.
Legislation is currently before Congress which would add a congressional seat to Utah, give Washington DC a voting seat, and would therefore give Utah 1 additional Electoral College vote. The total number of Electoral College votes would then be 539, and a majority would still be 270. The additional congressional seat would be permanent, and reapportioned normally after the 2010 census.
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How states currently assign Electors
Presidential Electors are nominated by their state political parties in the summer before the Popular Vote on Election Day. Each state provides its own means for the nomination of Electors. In some states, such as Oklahoma, the Electors are nominated in primaries the same way that other candidates are nominated. Other states, such as Virginia and North Carolina, nominate Electors in party conventions. In Pennsylvania, the campaign committees of the candidates name their candidates for Presidential Elector (an attempt to discourage faithless Electors). All states require the names of all Electors to be filed with the Secretary of State (or equivalent) at least a month prior to election day.
On election day, voters cast ballots for slates of Presidential Electors pledged to the candidates for president and vice president. The party that wins a state elects its entire slate of Electors. (Note the two exceptions in the following paragraph.) At the time of the state canvass of the vote, the Secretary of State (or equivalent) signs a special form called the Certificate of Ascertainment which sets forth the people elected to the office of Presidential Elector, along with the number of votes cast for every party's slate of Elector nominees. These Certificates of Ascertainment are forwarded to the Office of the Vice President to be used to verify that the people who cast the electoral votes are in fact the people who were elected for that purpose.
Two states elect the Presidential Electors with a slightly different method. Maine and Nebraska elect two Electors by a statewide ballot and choose their remaining Electors by congressional district. The method has been used in Maine since 1972 and Nebraska since 1996, though neither has split its electoral votes in modern elections.
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Electoral College
The Presidential Electors meet in their respective state capitols in December, 41 days following the election, at which time they cast their electoral votes. Thus the "electoral college" never meets as one national body. They ballot for President, then ballot for vice president. Afterward, the Electors sign a document called the Certificate of Vote which sets forth the number of votes cast for these two offices and is signed by all Electors. Multiple copies of the Certificate of Vote are signed, in order to provide multiple originals in case one is lost. One copy is sent to president of the Senate (i.e. the sitting Vice President of the United States); the certificates are placed in two special mahogany boxes where they await a joint session of the new Congress where they are opened and counted. Candidates must receive a majority of the electoral vote to be declared the president-elect or vice-president-elect.
If no candidate for President receives an absolute electoral majority 270 votes out of the 538 possible, then the new House of Representatives is required to go into session immediately to vote for President. (This would likely just occur when more than two candidates receive electoral votes, but could theoretically happen in a two-person contest, if each received exactly 269 electoral votes). In this case, the House of Representatives chooses from the three candidates who received the most electoral votes, but could not establish a majority of votes in the College. The House votes en-bloc by state for this purpose (that is, one vote per state, which is determined by the majority decision of the delegation from that state; if a state delegation is evenly split that state is considered as abstaining). This vote would be repeated if necessary until one candidate receives the votes of more than half the state delegations—at least 26 state votes, given the current number, 50, of states in the union.
If no candidate for Vice President receives an absolute majority of electoral votes, then the United States Senate must do the same, with the top two vote getters for that office as candidates. The Senate votes in the normal manner in this case, not by States. It is unclear if the sitting Vice President would be entitled to cast his usual tie-breaking vote if the Senate should be evenly split on the matter.
If the House of Representatives has not chosen a winner in time for the inauguration (noon on January 20), then the Constitution of the United States specifies that the new Vice President becomes Acting President until the House selects a President. If the winner of the Vice Presidential election is not known by then either, then under the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, the Speaker of the House of Representatives would become Acting President until the House selects a President or the Senate selects a Vice President.
On the one hand, the Twelfth Amendment specifies that the Senate should choose the Vice President, and it does not admit of a time limit on the selection process. On the other hand, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment allows the President to nominate a Vice President if a vacancy should occur.
As of 2006, the House of Representatives has elected the President on two occasions, in 1801 and in 1825. The Senate has chosen the Vice President once, in 1837.
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Faithless electors
A faithless elector is one who casts an electoral vote for someone other than whom they have pledged to elect. On 158 occasions, electors have cast their votes for president or vice president in a different manner than that prescribed by the legislature of the state they represent. Of those, 71 votes were changed because the original candidate died before the elector was able to cast a vote. Two votes were not cast at all when electors chose to abstain from casting their electoral vote for any candidate. The remaining 85 were changed by the elector's personal interest or perhaps by accident. Usually, the faithless electors act alone. An exception was in 1836 when 23 Virginia electors changed their vote together. In that year, Martin Van Buren's Vice Presidential running mate, Richard Johnson, did not receive the minimum votes to become the Vice President but ultimately won the office on the first ballot by the United States Senate in 1837.
There are laws to punish faithless electors in 24 states. While no faithless elector has ever been punished, the constitutionality of state pledge laws was brought before the Supreme Court in 1952 (Ray v. Blair, 343 U.S. 214). The court ruled in favor of state's right to require electors to pledge to vote for the winning candidate, as well as remove electors who refuse to pledge. As stated in the ruling, electors are acting as a function of the state, not the federal government. Therefore, states have the right to govern electors. The constitutionality of state laws punishing electors for actually casting a faithless vote, rather than refusing to pledge, has never been decided by the Supreme Court.
Since a state's electoral slate is chosen by the political party, and electors are usually those with high loyalty to the party and its candidate, a faithless elector runs a greater risk of party censure than governmental action.
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History
The Electoral College may have been implemented to negotiate compromises in cases of a split vote where each state was pushing its own native son. The United States presidential primary and the emergence of a two-party system has largely rendered this historical. One lasting theory is that the Electoral College helps dilute the effect of votes from densely populated centers which may steer away from the concerns of the rest of the country. Others have noted that the Electoral College enabled the Founding Fathers to deftly incorporate the Connecticut Compromise and three-fifths compromise into the system of choosing the President and Vice President, thereby sparing the convention further acrimony over the issue of state representation.
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Original Plan
Regardless of why the system was chosen, the term "Electoral College" is not used in the United States Constitution, and it was not until the early 1800s that it came into general usage as the unofficial designation for the group of citizens selected to cast votes for President and Vice President. It was first written into Federal law in 1845, and today the term appears in , in the section heading and in the text as "college of electors."
Section 1, Article II of the Constitution says, "Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or person holding an office of trust or profit under the United States, shall be appointed an elector." It then goes on to describe how the electors vote for President.
Originally, each elector voted for two persons, with no designation for President or Vice President. The person receiving the greatest number of votes (provided that such a number was a majority of electors) would be President, while the individual who was in second place became Vice President (and did not need the backing of the majority of electors; in theory the Vice President could have been elected with the support of as few as two electors if every other elector either cast the sole vote for a candidate, voted for a virtually unanimous choice for President or did not cast their second vote). If no one had received a majority of votes, then the House of Representatives would choose between the five highest vote-getters, with each state casting one vote. In such a case, the person who received the highest number of votes but was not chosen President would become Vice President. If there was ever a tie for second, then the Senate would choose the Vice President.
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Subsequent changes in the system
The original plan worked extremely well in the absence of political parties and organized presidential campaigns, but the plan broke down almost immediately once they developed. In 1796, for instance, rumors of conspiracies led to some Federalist electors only using one of their two votes so that their Presidential candidate John Adams came in first, but the Democratic-Republican candidate for President, Thomas Jefferson, placed second. Thus, the President and Vice President were from different parties. Although a situation like that is arguably not a problem, the situation that occurred in 1800 was most certainly a problem: Democratic-Republicans Jefferson and Aaron Burr tied the vote. Jefferson was the intended presidential contender, while Burr was the Vice Presidential one. However, electors did not differentiate between the two, nor could they under the system of the time, and all electors supporting them cast one vote for each. The electors for the Federalists, however, arranged it so that one elector voted for the Federalist presidential candidate but not for the Vice Presidential candidate. They voted instead for another person altogether. The election was thrown into the House of Representatives, which was controlled by the Federalists. The House voted 35 times, with Alexander Hamilton offering his support to Thomas Jefferson with the condition that Jefferson support certain Federalist policies and office-holders. Jefferson won on the thirty-sixth ballot after Delaware's only Representative, James Bayard—a Burr supporter—abstained in exchange for the terms Hamilton had originally offered. Burr became Vice President. For this, and numerous other reasons, Burr held a grudge against Hamilton, whom he later killed in a duel.
To address the problem of the 1800 election, the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution was passed. It made some minor and major changes to the Constitution. First, electors would no longer cast two ballots for President. Instead, they would cast one vote for President and a separate vote for Vice President. The individual receiving a majority of votes in a particular election would be elected. If no one received a majority in the presidential election, then the House of Representatives would choose between the top three, again voting by state. Similarly, the Senate chooses between the top two in the case of the Vice President. Under the new rules, the House of Representatives did elect the President on one more occasion: the 1824 four-way race among Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, William H. Crawford, and Henry Clay resulted in no candidate receiving an absolute majority of electoral votes. The House elected Adams on the first ballot, even though Jackson received the most electoral and popular votes.
Under the provisions of the Constitution there is no requirement for a state to poll its voters. The state legislature can in theory appoint the electors as it likes, and, until 1860, South Carolina did just this. Furthermore, in 1788 the concept of "democracy" was widely seen as analogous to mob-rule, while the idea of political parties was equally frowned upon, and so the idea of a directly elected head of state was anathema to many. The Federalist Papers suggest that it was commonly assumed by the Founding Fathers that most Presidents would be selected by the House of Representatives.
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Alternative methods of choosing electors
The current system of choosing Presidential Electors is called the "short ballot." In all states, voters choose among slates of candidates for Elector; only a few states list the names of the Presidential Electors on the ballot. (In some states, if a voter wishes to write in a candidate for president, the voter also is required to write in the names of candidates for Elector.)
Before the advent of the "short ballot" in the early twentieth century, the most common means of electing the Presidential Electors was through the "General Ticket." The General Ticket is quite similar to the current system and is often confused with it. In the General Ticket, voters cast ballots for individuals running for Presidential Elector (while in the short ballot, voters cast ballots for an entire slate of Electors). In the General Ticket, the state canvass would report the number of votes cast for each candidate for Elector, a complicated process in states like New York with multiple positions to fill. Both the General Ticket and the short ballot are often considered At Large or winner-takes-all voting. The short ballot was adopted by the various states at different times; it was adopted for use by North Carolina and Ohio in 1932 (possibly the first year in which it was used). Alabama was still using the General Ticket as late as 1960 and was one of the last states to switch to the short ballot.
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Appointment by state legislature
By far the most popular method of choosing electors after winner-takes-all is selection by the state legislature. It was used by more than half of the states in 1792 and 1800 and exactly half of the states in 1812. One of the reasons that most United States history textbooks don't start reporting the popular vote until the election of 1824 is because more than a quarter of all the states used legislative choice in previous elections, so there was no popular vote in those states. Even in 1824, when Andrew Jackson famously accused Adams and Clay of a "Corrupt bargain" because he lost in spite of having pluralities of both the popular and electoral votes, a full quarter of the states (6 of 24) had the state legislatures choose their electors. By the following election, only Delaware and South Carolina continued to use legislative choice, and Delaware dropped out the following election. South Carolina stubbornly held on to legislative choice until they became the first state to secede in December 1860.
Legislative appointment made two more appearances on the electoral stage: first, in 1868, the newly reconstructed state of Florida appointed its electors, having been readmitted too late to hold elections. Then, in 1876, the newly admitted state of Colorado used legislative choice due to a lack of time and money to hold an election. (It was also a potent threat in the 2000 election: had the recounts continued, the Florida legislature was prepared to appoint the Republican slate of electors to avoid missing the federal deadline for choosing electors.)
Appointment by state legislature is the constitutional default: the Constitution gives the power to the state legislatures to decide how electors are chosen, and it is easier (and cheaper) for a state legislature to simply appoint a slate of electors than to create a legislative framework for holding elections to determine the electors. As noted above, the two situations in which legislative choice has been used since the Civil War have both been because there was not enough time or money to prepare for an election. However, appointment by state legislature has a serious flaw, aside from its democratic deficit: legislatures can deadlock more easily than the electorate. In fact, this is precisely what happened in 1789, when New York failed to appoint any electors.
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Electoral districts
Another method for choosing electors is to divide the state up into electoral districts, and the voters of each district get to choose a single elector, much as states are presently divided into congressional districts for choosing representatives. The electoral districts cannot correspond with congressional districts, because there are two more electoral districts than congressional districts. Obviously, this method is prone to gerrymandering.
This method had a fairly stable set of adherents and was the last non-legislative method to go extinct. It died out as the Second Party System developed, unable to compete with winner-take-all in a partisan environment. It experienced a brief renaissance in Michigan in 1892, but was immediately returned to winner-take-all for the following election. Michigan's electoral vote was split 9–6 in the 1892 election.
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Maine method
The "Maine Method" is a mixture of the district and statewide / short ballot modes of selection. It has this name because it was adopted by Maine for the 1972 presidential election and remains in place. Nebraska has used the Maine Method for presidential elections beginning in 1996.
In the Maine Method, the votes for president are summed for each congressional district. The party winning each district elects one Presidential Elector. Then the vote is summed for the entire state. The party winning the statewide vote elects two Presidential Electors.
The Maine Method is actually very old. It was first used by Massachusetts, which used it in the elections of 1804, 1812, and 1820. After Maine split off from Massachusetts in 1820, it used this method through the election of 1828, then abandoned it for 144 years before returning to it for the election of 1972.
In the 18 state contests in which this method has been used, only once has it achieved a result different from winner-take-all: in Maine, in 1828, 1 of Maine's 9 electoral votes went to Andrew Jackson.
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Tennessee, 1796 and 1800
In its first two presidential elections, Tennessee used a unique method of choosing its electors. The state is constitutionally divided into three Grand Divisions. In both of these elections, Tennessee had three electors, so each Grand Division would choose one of the electors. Each Grand Division in turn comprised several counties. Each of these counties would choose an electoral delegate by popular vote. The county delegates for each Grand Division would then meet and in turn choose the elector for that Grand Division.
This system was retired in 1804, when reapportionment gave Tennessee five electors.
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New York, 1828
In 1828, New York used its own unique variant of the Maine method for choosing electors. Just as Maine and Nebraska now do, voters in each congressional district would select one elector. Then these electors would in turn choose the remaining electors, instead of these electors being directly determined by voters statewide. In this single state contest, it resulted in a 20–16 split between Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams.
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Unequal weight of voters
Supporters of direct election argue that it would give everyone an equally weighted vote, regardless of what state they live in, and oppose giving disproportionately amplified voting power to voters in small states. They contend that the Electoral College does not give that equal weight. For example, in 1988 the combined voting age population of the six least populous states (Alaska, Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming) plus the District of Columbia was 3,119,000, and carrying 21 Electoral votes between them. The State of Florida, which had 9,614,000 persons of voting age, carried exactly the same number of Electoral College votes: 21. Each Floridian's potential vote, then, by this argument, carried only about one third the weight of a potential vote in any of the other states listed. In another example, consider California. All of the state's electoral votes are awarded to a candidate regardless of how much of the electorate actually goes to the polls. In the next-to-impossible event that only one Californian turns out to vote, all of California's 55 electoral votes would go according to that single vote. Granted, this would never really happen, but the system does provide for such an event.
Proponents of the current system counter that electoral votes are worth more when they are bunched up together. In other words, 21 electors are worth more than 7 sets of 3 electors, because 21 EVs could easily turn the result of the election, while a person voting in a 3-electoral vote state would not have such a proportionally large effect on the result.
Essentially, the Electoral College ensures that candidates, particularly in recent elections, pay attention to key 'swing-states' (those states that are not firmly rooted in either the Republican or Democratic party). In practice, Presidential campaigns may not place great emphasis on winning the states with small populations, although as the larger states are more firmly counted on as being for one party or the other (an example of which is California, now firmly controlled by the Democratic party), smaller 'swing-states' are growing in importance because of the number to get to the 50% majority plus one in order to get to the 'magic' number of 270 electoral votes). They do of course pour the bulk of their resources into "battleground states" which are equally divided between the two major parties—but the large battleground states get more resources than the smaller ones, not fewer. In any case, the small states are a diverse group and it would be virtually impossible for a candidate to find a coherent set of policies which would favor them at the expense of the larger states.
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Losing the popular vote
In the elections of 1824, 1876, 1888, and 2000, the candidate who received a plurality of the popular vote did not become president. The 1824 election was eventually decided by Congress and thus distinct from the last three which were decided without.
Proponents of the system counter that the Electoral College requires candidates to garner more widespread support throughout the Union; a popular vote system could elect a person who wins by a large margin in a few states over another person who wins by small margins in most states. The latter candidate, the argument goes, has to appeal to a broader array of interests than the former and is less likely to be a demagogue or extremist. However, the Electoral College is not guaranteed to favor the latter candidate in that scenario. In fact, given the 2000 allocation of electors, a candidate could win with the support of just the 11 largest states.
Further, there is currently no such thing as a national "popular vote," because combining the different popular votes into a single vote has serious statistical problems, and claims of the electoral college denying the "popular will" are specious. For example, voters in Massachusetts or Texas in 2000, as their respective states were sure to vote Democrat or Republican for President, were more likely to vote for a third party candidate, or not vote at all, since their vote for their preferred Democrat or Republican candidate was extremely unlikely to change the result. Conversely, a voter in Florida was more likely to vote Democrat or Republican, even if they favored a third-party candidate, because their vote was much more likely to make a difference.
Similarly, the effect might be more likely to affect one candidate than another; for example, as there was a large anti-Bush sentiment in 2004, voters in uncontested states might have been more willing to come out in favor of John Kerry, despite their vote being less likely to make a difference, as a sign of opposition to incumbent George W. Bush.
The effects of this phenomenon are somewhat known, but impossible to quantify in any close election, such as in 2000, when Al Gore had 0.5% more of the cast votes than George W. Bush, far inside the margin of error of any study. Because of the extremely thin margin, the only way to know who would have won the popular vote in 2000 would be to have conducted an actual popular vote.
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Focus on large swing states
Most states use a winner-take-all system, in which the candidate with the most votes in that state receives all of the state's electoral votes. Candidates will pay more attention to larger states without a clear favorite. California, Texas, and New York, in spite of having the largest populations, are usually considered safe for a particular party, and will therefore be ignored by candidates (except for fundraising efforts). Small states such as New Mexico which are winnable for both major parties, but yield a small number of electoral votes also tend to be ignored by candidates. Large "swing states" like Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania are usually considered winnable for both major parties and a large number of electoral votes turn on their results, and so candidates tend to disproportionately spend more time on these close states, at the expense of the voters in "safe states" or small states.
Proponents claim, however, that adoption of the popular vote would simply shift the disproportionate focus to large cities at the expense of rural areas.
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Assumption of local uniformity
Detractors claim that the Electoral College assumes that voters within states vote monolithically, when in fact this is not the case. Many states are deeply divided over how to vote in a Presidential election. A key element of democracy is that voters disagree among themselves on what they consider their interests, and this happens within states as well as between states. For example, in the 2000 election, New Hampshire's voters voted 48% for Bush, and 47% for Gore. All of New Hampshire's electoral votes, however, went to Bush. This causes candidates to focus their efforts on states whose electoral votes are in question, rather than individual voters whose ballots are in play, and may contribute to broader sectional divisions.
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Disadvantage for third parties
Opponents also argue that the method by which most states allot their electoral votes tends to favor a two-party system. Even when a third-party candidate receives a significant number of popular votes, such a candidate may not receive a plurality in any state and may not garner even a single electoral vote, as was the case of Ross Perot, who won 18% of the popular vote in the 1992 elections. Proponents counter by stating that a third-party candidate with enough votes to win will usually be able to garner some electoral votes, and these electors might even hold the balance of power. Additionally, third parties with a strong sectional appeal could actually find their strength enhanced by the Electoral College.
Some proponents of proportional representation claim that, because third parties generally start as regional phenomena and because the Electoral College is a form of regional allocation, the Electoral College would enhance the power of third parties if electoral votes were allocated by proportional representation.
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Elections ending up decided by Congress
There is also the possibility that no candidate receives a majority of electoral votes. It is possible in a three-way race that no candidate would reach the magic 270 number. Even in a two-way race, it is possible for neither candidate to win a majority, by tying 269–269. If no candidate hit 270, the election would, according to Amendment Twelve go to the House of Representatives, where the Constitution provides that each state delegation has one vote for President, regardless of population. This gives small states an even stronger advantage than they have in the College. (In fact, the election did go to the House in the election of 1824, resulting in the purported "corrupt bargain" and the election of John Quincy Adams as President). If the House election were to tie, or if enough delegations were evenly divided between candidates, the situation would become more complicated: Section 3 of the Twentieth Amendment would take control. Assuming that the Senate were able to choose a Vice President-elect, he would become the acting President until the Congress could choose a President. If the Senate were unable to choose a Vice President-elect, then the Speaker of the House, as next in line in the order of succession to the presidency, would act as President until either a President-elect or Vice President-elect could be determined. Meanwhile, the Congress would be unable to participate in any other business until electing a President.
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Excludes American citizens who are residents of the territories
If an American national is a resident of one of the unincorporated territories of the United States (i.e., American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the United States Virgin Islands), he or she cannot vote for electors for President. The territories, combined, contain around 4.5 million people. This is part of a more general disfranchisement because these nationals also cannot vote for representatives or senators.
Any attempt to amend the Constitution to allow these nationals to vote for electors would be complicated by the need to come up with a formula for the number of electors to be chosen by these nationals that would mesh well with the existing formula for states and the District of Columbia. Opponents of the Electoral College system argue that a direct election would avoid this complication.
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Paradoxical effects of the House size
One little-known quality of the Electoral College system is the fact that in close elections, the exact number of seats in the House of Representatives becomes a crucial factor in deciding the outcome. The current House size of 435 seats was fixed by an Act of Congress in 1910, not by the constitution, and Congress could change it at will. Since the number of Senators is fixed by the Constitution to exactly twice the number of States, enlarging the House would lessen the advantage of smaller states in Presidential elections, while downsizing it would strengthen their advantage. If we take the popular votes cast at the Election of 2000 and the population figures of the 1990 United States Census with the consequential apportionment of House seats to the states as a given, George W. Bush would have won the election for all House sizes less than 491, while Al Gore would have won for all house sizes greater than 598 (except at 655, which gives a tie). In between those two numbers, the winner unsystematically oscillates back and forth many times; of the 105 house sizes between those numbers, there is a tie 23 times, Bush wins 53 times, and Gore wins 29 times. The effect is caused by the sequence in which states, blue or red, receive the next house seat.
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Requires a distribution of popular support to win the Presidency
Proponents of the Electoral College argue that organizing votes by regions forces a candidate to seek popular support over a majority of the country. Since a candidate cannot count on winning election based solely on a heavy concentration of votes in a few areas, the Electoral College avoids much of the sectionalism that has plagued other geographically large nations, such as China, India, the Soviet Union, and the Roman Empire. Electoral College opponents, however, argue that this regional system can dilute the overall will of the people in close elections by thwarting the candidate with the popular majority. Considering the distrust the Constitution's framers had of democracy, this result can be viewed as a foreseeable and desirable result of the arrangement.
Also, there are many examples of candidates winning the Electoral College despite a lack of broad national support. Lincoln won in 1860 without taking a single southern state. The same thing occurred again with the Republican candidates in 1880 and 1888, and nearly happened (save border states West Virginia and Kentucky) in 1896, 1900, 1904, and 1908, and 1924.
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Maintains the federal character of the nation
The United States of America is a federal coalition; it consists of component states, each of which are joined in an alliance with what has, traditionally, been a small, state-controlled central government. For many years early in the nation's history, up until the Jacksonian Era, most states appointed their electors by a vote of the state legislature, and proponents argue that, in the end, the election of the President must still come down to the decisions of each state, or the federal nature of the United States will give way to a single massive, centralized government.
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Enhances status of minority groups
Far from decreasing the power of minority groups by depressing voter turnout, proponents argue that, by making the votes of a given state an all-or-nothing affair, minority groups can provide the critical edge that allows a candidate to win. This forces candidates to court a wide variety of such minorities and special interests.
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Encourages stability through the two-party system
Many proponents of the electoral college see its negative effect on emergent third parties as a good thing. They didn't believe it protects the most powerful office in the country from control by what these proponents view as unstable, often transitory, radical minorities until they can moderate their views to win broad, long-term support from across the entire nation. Critics of this argument, of course, disagree that emerging third parties are a bad thing.
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Turnout related factors
The Electoral College mitigates against the influence of factors that can affect voter turnout. A major snow storm in a region of the country could suppress voter turnout there. States with gubernatorial or senate races of a high interest level will likely have a higher than normal turnout. Under a popular vote system, such turnout variations would influence the relative strength of a state's vote, while with the electoral college, such variations do not affect the states' relative influence on the national outcome. On the other hand, this means that individual voters from states with an above-average turnout are regularly disadvantaged against voters from low turnout states.
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Isolation of Election Problems
Some supporters of the Electoral College note that it isolates the impact of potential election fraud or other problems to the state where such occurs. The College prevents instances where a party dominant in one state may dishonestly inflate the votes for a candidate and thereby affect the election outcome. Recounts, for instance, occur only on a state-by-state basis, not nationwide. Similarly, the College acts to isolate less malicious election problems to the state in which they occur.
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Maintains Separation of Powers
The Constitution separated government into three branches that check each other to minimize threats to liberty and encourage deliberation of governmental acts. Under the original framework, only members of the House of Representatives were directly elected by the people, with members of the Senate chosen by state legislatures, the President by the Electoral College, and the judiciary by the President and the Senate. The President was not directly elected in part due to fears that he could assert a national popular mandate that would undermine the legitimacy of the other branches, and potentially result in tyranny.
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Death or unsuitability of a candidate
While it is common to think of the electoral votes as numbers, the college is in fact made up of real people (usually party regulars of the party whose candidate wins each state). If a candidate were to die or become in some other way unsuitable to serve as President or Vice President, these electors can choose a suitable replacement who would most likely come from the same party of the candidate who won the election. The time period of such a death or unsuitability that is covered extends from before election day (many states cannot change ballots at a late stage) until the day the electors vote, the first Monday after the second Wednesday of December.
In the election of 1872, Democratic candidate Horace Greeley did in fact die before the meeting of the electoral college, resulting in Democratic disarray; the candidates split their votes across several candidates, including three votes cast for the deceased Greeley. It hardly mattered, however, as President Ulysses S. Grant, the Republican incumbent had already won an absolute majority of electors. Because it was the death of a losing candidate, there was no pressure upon these electors to agree on a replacement candidate. There has never been a case of a candidate of the winning party dying, so the unity of the winning party's electors in such a situation has never been tested.
In 1912, after the Republicans had renominated President Taft and Vice President Sherman, Sherman died shortly before the election, too late to change the names on the ballot, thus causing Sherman to be listed there posthumously. That ticket finished third behind the Democrats (Woodrow Wilson) and the Progressives (Theodore Roosevelt), and the 8 electoral votes that Sherman would have received were cast for Nicholas M. Butler.
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Proportional vote
The primary proposal of this type is for states to implement a proportional vote system. Under such a system, electors would be selected in proportion to the votes cast for their candidate or party, rather than being selected to represent only the plurality vote. As an example, consider the 2000 election, in which the George W. Bush / Richard Cheney (Republican) and Albert Gore Jr. / Joseph Lieberman (Democrat) tickets were the primary contenders, with the Ralph Nader / Winona LaDuke (Green) ticket taking a small but noteworthy minority. In California, the approximate proportion of votes for these tickets was 41.65 percent Bush/Cheney, 53.45 percent Gore/Lieberman, and 3.82 percent Nader/LaDuke. Under the current system, all 54 electoral votes were for Gore/Lieberman. Under a simple proportional system, the votes might be distributed as 23 Bush/Cheney, 29 Gore/Lieberman, and 2 Nader/LaDuke.
As a practical matter, this system would be very difficult to implement. According to the Constitution, the state legislatures decide how electors are chosen. It is usually against the interest of an individual state to switch to a method of proportional allocation because it reduces that state's influence in the Electoral College. For example, in 2004, the state of Colorado voted down an initiative on its 2004 ballot, Amendment 36, which would have instituted a system of proportional allocation of electors beginning immediately with the 2004 election. Let's suppose that in 2006, Amendment 36 were put back on the ballot and passed. Then Colorado would not be a swing state in 2008, no matter how closely contested it might be. Instead of candidates vying for all nine of Colorado's votes, they would be fighting for a single vote.
A perceived problem with dividing electoral votes proportionally is that it would be harder for a candidate to achieve a majority of the electoral vote, since a proportional system would enable a third party candidate to win electoral votes. If this system had been used in 1992 and 1996, and all electors had voted as pledged, there would have been no winner at all, and the House of Representatives would have chosen the president, and the Senate would have selected the Vice President. In 1996 Robert Dole would almost certainly have been the House winner, and Jack Kemp the Senate, as well, despite receiving significantly fewer votes than Bill Clinton and Al Gore. In 2000, Al Gore would have received 269 electoral votes, George W. Bush 263, and Ralph Nader 6. If all electors voted as pledged, the Presidential race would have gone to the House, and Bush likely would have won, but the Vice Presidential decision in the Senate would have likely split 51–50 for Lieberman, with Al Gore casting the deciding vote.
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Maine–Nebraska method
Other observers argue that the current electoral rules of Maine and Nebraska should be extended nationwide. As previously noted, the winner in each of those two states is only guaranteed two of Maine's four and Nebraska's five electoral votes, with the winner of each Congressional district in those states receiving one electoral vote. Using the California example again, Gore won 33 of the state's Congressional districts and the state overall, while Bush won 19 Congressional districts. The state's electoral votes would then have gone 35–19 for Gore.
However, this kind of allocation would still make it possible for the loser of the popular vote to become president. If every state used the Maine–Nebraska system, George W. Bush would have won in 2000 by an even larger Electoral College majority than he did with winner-take-all. Also, dividing electoral votes by House district winners would create yet another incentive for partisan gerrymandering. If a district system had been used in 1960, Richard Nixon would have been elected, despite losing the popular vote.
Another perceived problem with this suggestion is that it would actually further increase the advantage of small states. In winner-take-all, the small states' disproportionally high number of electors is partially offset by the fact that large states with their big electoral blocks are such a highly desirable boon to a candidate that large swing states actually receive much more attention during the campaign than smaller states. In proportional representation or Maine–Nebraska, this advantage of the large states would be gone.
Yet another argument with both Maine–Nebraska and proportional representation is that even if it is considered superior as a nationwide system, winner-take-all generally maximizes the power of an individual state and thus while it might be in the interest of the nation, it is not in the interest of the state to adopt any other system. Since the United States constitution gives the states the power to choose their method of appointing the electors, nationwide Maine–Nebraska without a constitutional amendment mandating it seems unlikely, and the passage of such an amendment seems equally unlikely since the House delegations of the largest states (against whose interests such a system would be), taken together, easily surpass the one third of the House size that is needed to block a constitutional amendment.
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Abolishing the non-proportional electors ("drop two")
Another proposed reform is to make the number of electors that each state has the same as its number of Representatives (effectively the same as the current system, except taking two electoral votes from each state). This plan, sometimes called "drop two," could still be inherently unfair, as some of the least populous states would be proportionally overrepresented while some of the slightly more populous single-representative states would be significantly underrepresented (i.e. Wyoming, the least populous state has 1 Representative for 510,000 inhabitants; Montana has 1 Representative for 935,000 inhabitants; compare this to California, which averages one Representative for each 681,000 inhabitants).
Proponents of this suggestion say that this will preserve the Electoral College's benefits and make the system more democratic at the same time. Others say this will remove the extra power given to the small states intended to make elections fairer and there would still exist the phenomenon of non-swing states being ignored.
Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. has proposed decreasing the number of electors in the Electoral College from 538 to 438, with each state alloted the same number of votes as their number of representatives in the House of Representatives (with 3 votes for the District of Columbia). Each state would be required to use a "winner-take-all" system. Then, 100 votes would automatically be given to the winner of the national popular vote. Schlesinger felt that this would maintain the stability of a two-party system (as a "winner-take-all system" already does), while virtually guaranteeing that the person who wins the national popular vote would automatically win the Presidental election.
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Interstate compact
A fourth proposal calls for an interstate compact whereby parties agree to allocate their electors to the winner of the national, popular vote. It would establish a direct vote and effectively circumvent the Electoral College system.
The proposal centers on Article II, Section 1 of the United States Constitution, which provides, "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress." (However, it is also true that all interstate compacts require the consent of Congress, and it is possible that Congress may not assent. It is unclear which clause takes precedence here.)
Partial versions of this plan have emerged over the years. The most formal to date is the Agreement Among the States to Elect the President by National Popular Vote, a bill which state lawmakers in 2006 began introducing in legislatures across the United States. The Agreement passed the California state Senate on August 22, 2006 and the state Assembly on August 30, 2006. Bills also were filed in Colorado, Illinois, Louisiana, Missouri and New York. If the compact were to pass in all 5 states (for a total of 136 electoral votes), they would have more than half of the required 270. States may provide their electoral vote in any way their law specifies, although all states provide their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the most popular votes in the state. Therefore, the California bill would have provide California's Electoral College votes to the candidate who wins the most popular votes in the United States, rather than California, given that enough states do so so that a total of 270 electoral votes (the number required for election) would be provided in this manner. This would create a system equivalent to a true popular vote system, since whichever candidate who receives the majority national popular vote would receive the 270 majority of electoral votes provided by the states that pass this bill, without having to alter the federal constitution..
Detractors have identified a collective action problem inherent in implementation of such a plan. Candidate attention on battleground states may benefit those states in terms of promised policy and resources. As such, those states have a disincentive to sign on where doing so would make them relatively less attractive to presidential campaigns. The National Popular Vote plan attempts to address this problem by providing that the present manner of allocating electors shall remain in force until so many states have signed on as to account for a majority of electoral votes.
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See also
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Notes
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