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Electoral College and Votes
The election of a president and vice president is accomplished through the Electoral College system, which the framers of the Constitution conceived as a compromise between selection by Congress and direct election by popular vote. Each state has as many members in the college as it does in Congress, and it is those 538 electors—equal to the 435 House members and 100 senators, plus three votes added for the District of Columbia under the Twenty-third Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1961—who actually elect the government's two top officers.
Few of the framers' actions have been more criticized. Thomas Jefferson decried the indirect election system as “the most dangerous blot on our Constitution,” and people have been calling for reform ever since.
The compromise made a great concession to the less-populous states because it assured them of three electoral votes (two for their two senators and at least one for their representative) no matter how small their populations might be. The plan also left important powers with the states by giving complete discretion to state legislatures to determine the method of choosing electors.
The system finally agreed upon (Article II, section 1, clause 2) grew out of problems arising from diverse state voting requirements, the slavery problem, big-state versus small-state rivalries, and the complexities of the balance of power among different branches of the government. Moreover, it was probably as close to a direct popular election as the men who wrote the Constitution thought possible and appropriate at the time.
Direct election was opposed because it was believed generally that the people lacked sufficient knowledge of the character and qualifications of possible candidates to make an intelligent choice. Many delegates also feared that the people of the various states would be unlikely to agree on a single person, usually casting their votes for favorite son candidates well known to them.
The term Electoral College itself does not appear in the Constitution. It was first used unofficially in the early 1800s and became the official designation for the electoral body in 1845.
How the System Works
When Americans vote for a particular presidential candidate, they are in fact voting for a slate of electors pledged to that candidate. The winning electors in each state then meet in their state capital on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December to cast their votes for president and vice president. A statement of the vote is sent to Washington, D.C., where Congress counts the votes on January 6.
An absolute majority of electoral votes (270 out of a total of 538 in recent years) is needed to elect. This normally is not a problem under the nation's long-standing two-party system; in most elections, only the major-party candidates have qualified for electoral votes, and the statistical likelihood that the sums of the candidates' state electoral vote victories will add up to an exact 269–269 tie under today's alignment is low (though the 271 votes that gave Republican George W. Bush the White House in 2000 came perilously close).
Yet the possibility exists for a tie, or for an unusually strong third-party candidate to win enough electoral votes to deprive any major-party candidate of an electoral majority. In such an instance, the House of Representatives must choose the president, which has occurred twice in U.S. history: in the 1800 election won by Thomas Jefferson and the 1824 election won by John Quincy Adams. (The 1876 presidential election, in which there was a schismatic dispute over which candidate had secured an electoral vote majority, was resolved by a bipartisan commission in favor of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes.) In the case of a House election of a president, each state's delegation has one vote—which almost certainly would go to the candidate of the party holding the most seats in that delegation—and a candidate must receive the votes of a majority of states for election. (The Senate chooses the vice president if no candidate wins a majority of the Electoral College vote for that office.)
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