Absolute Majority

In electoral or legislative voting, an absolute majority is more than 50 percent of all those eligible to vote, regardless of how many actually voted. A simple majority, by contrast, consists of a majority of those voting, not of the whole eligible pool. Nearly all electoral politics and legislative procedures in the United States are based on the principle of a simple majority.

The U.S. Senate is often used as an example to illustrate these terms because it has exactly 100 members. Therefore, an absolute majority of the Senate is fifty-one or more votes. But not all senators vote on every motion or bill, and most bills or motions carry if they receive most of the votes that were cast—even if this is short of the absolute majority of fifty-one.

For instance, if only sixty-six senators vote on a bill, it passes if there are at least thirty-four “ayes,” because that is more than half of the total vote. But it would be only 34 percent of the Senate membership and therefore a simple majority, not an absolute majority.

The same principle applies to most American elections. Even in states, districts, and other jurisdictions typically marked by high turnout, the number of actual participants always falls well short of 100 percent; therefore, in almost any election, the winner—even if he or she takes a majority of votes cast—will receive votes from less than a majority of all eligible voters. In jurisdictions marked by low voter turnout, winners of elections are typically chosen by smaller fractions of the total electorate.

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There is, however, a huge exception to this rule: the election for president of the United States, in which the winner is determined not by the nationwide popular vote, but by the sum of electoral votes won by the candidates on a state-by-state basis.

To be elected president or vice president, a candidate must receive an absolute majority of the 538 votes in the electoral college, or at least 270 votes. A presidential candidate with an electoral vote majority is deemed elected even if that candidate receives less than a majority of the votes cast—something that has happened eighteen times—or even fewer popular votes than an opponent. (See electoral anomalies.)

The latter has happened four times in U.S. history, most recently in 2000. Republican George W. Bush trailed Democrat Al Gore by one-half of one percentage point in the national popular vote, but he was elected president with a bare majority of 271 electoral votes after a Supreme Court ruling in the case of bush v. gore effectively decided a controversial vote-counting dispute in Florida in his favor.

That 271 majority was the smallest for a presidential winner in all the elections since 1964, the first in which the total number of electoral votes reached 538 (equal to the 535 members of Congress plus three votes for the district of columbia). Although Bush was reelected with a 51 percent popular vote majority in his 2004 race with Democrat John Kerry, his 286 electoral vote majority ranks as the second smallest of that era. Democrat Jimmy Carter's 297 electoral votes in his 1976 victory over Gerald R. Ford, the Republican incumbent, is the third smallest.

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