Electors

WHEN AMERICANS HEAD to the polls for presidential elections, many do not realize that their vote for a particular candidate is actually a selection of a slate of electors. These electors are part of an intricate and unique mechanism known as the Electoral College, by which Americans choose their presidents (and vice presidents). The framers of the Constitution, in an effort to maintain a nonpartisan political system, created the Electoral College.

While the hope of party-free politics quickly dimmed, the Electoral College system has survived. Under the Constitution, each state is allocated a number of electors representing its two senators and its number of U.S. representatives.

This means that a state's number of electors may fluctuate with a population change, but each must maintain a minimum of three electors. Under the original constitutional scheme, the American people would select [Page 217]slates of these electors to represent them at the Electoral College, giving the people an indirect role in the actual election.

In the modern Constitutional system, the Electoral College framework has changed slightly. Rather than the people choosing electors, the major political parties usually select them. The only restriction on this choice is that no elector can be serving as a member of Congress or an employee of the federal government. These prohibitions are necessary to preserve the separation of powers. Thus, when the American people vote on Election Day, they actually cast their ballots for one of the party's slate of electors. Moreover, the party whose candidate wins the popular vote in the state gets all the electoral votes from that state, though a few states distribute the electoral votes proportionally.

On the Monday after the second Wednesday of December following the election, the winning party's electors meet in the Electoral College to cast their votes. Each elector casts one vote for president and one vote for vice president.

The Constitution also requires that at least one of these votes be for a candidate outside the elector's home state. The electoral votes are then sent to the president of the Senate where they are counted. One of the major arguments against the continued use of electors is a fear of the “faithless elector” who is pledged to one candidate by the popular vote, but ends up voting for another. Such fears are not entirely unfounded given that there have been a handful of such faithless electors since 1960.

In response to this problem, many states have enacted laws making it a crime for an elector to act against the popular vote. Yet, given the large number of electors involved in presidential selection, the number of defections are few, and only very rarely would they affect an election outcome.