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Issues: Election 2004
Electoral College (last updated August 12, 2002) (back to top)
The electoral college - the two-part system by which the United States determines its president - was a controversial subject in the aftermath of the 2000 election, but debate over how the president should be elected goes back to the very foundation of the United States.
Under the electoral college, presidential elections involve two phases. First, people vote for a presidential candidate, but their votes actually elect a slate of electors who are in most states obligated to vote for that specific candidate. Second, in a move that was originally supposed to be substantive but has now become largely formalistic, those electors vote and officially elect the next President of the United States by majority vote.
There are 538 electoral votes in total, and states are allotted such votes based on the number of seats they have in the House and Senate, a decision by the Framers of the Constitution that honored some of the compromises they made elsewhere such as counting 3/5 of a state's slaves as population, and giving each state two senators, regardless of the state's actual size. Accordingly, each state now has at least three electoral votes (two for each senator, and one minimum for the House) and the allotment of votes changes after each census. The following chart shows the distribution of votes following the 1990 and 2000 censuses, and helps explain why California, Texas and New York are such great prizes.
Today's supporters of the electoral college note that it encourages presidential candidates to appeal to all states, and not just to particular groups spanning states, that it pushes candidates to the political center where they can secure the most votes, and that it magnifies the results of a popular election to ensure some kind of political mandate even when the winner does not have a popular majority (compare the charts here). Supporters also note that logistically, the electoral college focuses attention on specific states (imagine the Florida recount occurring in many states, not just one). They compare the electoral college to the World Series; it doesn't matter how many runs you scored over the course of the series, just how many games you won in the end.
Opponents, however, say that it does not encourage voter turnout, that it gives too much weight to small states and less weight to those in more populated states, and that it can result in a president without a public mandate. The electoral college also makes it much tougher for third-party candidates to win enough electoral votes to have a real chance at becoming president; third-party candidates are thus typically seen as spoilers for one candidate or another and do not secure electoral votes unless they have particular regional support (the last third-party candidate to get any electoral votes was George Wallace in 1968).
Historical Roots of the Electoral College
For better or worse, the electoral college has evolved at the federal and state levels very differently from what the Framers intended.
In 1776, when the Framers met to craft a governing document for what would become the United States, one of the many issues was how to determine who would hold executive power. The Framers rejected the idea of a direct popular-vote election, worried that people would simply vote for the regional favorite and that no candidate would ever get sufficient national support to win such an election. They also rejected having the legislature select the president, worried that Congress would then hold too much power. They thus settled on the electoral college as a compromise.
The Framers ultimately wanted a system that was like Congress, but which was independent of that body and which could not be corrupted, since it was convened for only one vote before dissipating forever. The Framers wanted electors who would use their sound judgment and vote for someone who would be a good president for the entire country, and not just for their home regions. The candidate with the most electoral votes would be president, the one with the second-highest would be vice-president, and ties or situations where no candidate got enough votes would go to the House.
In Federalist Paper No. 68, Alexander Hamilton praised this version of the electoral college as ensuring that, while the American people as a whole played a part in electing the president, "the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice."
But the Framers did not account for the rapid rise of political parties, and how states would come to select electors based on their commitment to vote for a specific candidate. These developments resulted in the United States' first electoral crisis. In 1800, Republican candidates Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr won the same number of electoral votes, which meant the election was actually a tie between the two running mates. The election then deadlocked in the House of Representatives, where Federalists threw their support to Burr in order to prevent Jefferson's election, and the House did not produce Jefferson as president until the 36th ballot. Soon after, the Twelfth Amendment altered the electoral college so that electors would vote specifically for a president and a vice-president, preventing such a situation from recurring.
Since the Twelfth Amendment, the electoral college has withstood calls for substantial change, except for adding three votes to account for the District of Columbia. Changes have thus occurred in the states, which can set the procedures for selecting electors however they wish. States quickly allowed popular vote to decide their slate of electors, rather than state legislatures. Most states now require their electors to vote for the candidate they originally agreed to vote for (although there have occasionally been "rogue" electors who cast their electoral votes for another candidate, such as a Democrat who voted in the 1988 election for Lloyd Bentsen as president instead of for Michael Dukakis), and all but two states (Maine and Nebraska) allot their electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis.
Historical Results of the Electoral College
Most of the time, the electoral-college system produces a winner who also won the majority of popular votes cast (although, due to lower than 100 percent voter turnout, not necessarily a majority of the votes that could have been cast). This has happened in 34 of the 54 elections conducted as of the beginning of the 21st century.
However, there have been three (arguably four) elections in which the electoral college produced a winner who did not win the most popular votes, 14 more elections in which the electoral college produced a winner who did not win a majority of votes, and two elections that had to be decided by the House of Representatives.
The three (arguably four) elections in which the electoral college resulted in a different president who did not receive the most popular votes are:
- 1876: Samuel Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes. Hayes trailed Tilden in popular vote but won in electoral college by one vote. Voter fraud on all sides. Competing sets of electors in three southern states and Oregon. Special national commission awarded Hayes all the contested electors on a party-line vote (8 republicans, seven democrats).
- 1888: Benjamin Harrison had most electoral votes but fewer popular votes. Harrison lost popular vote to Cleveland but won electoral vote. No outcry.
- 1960: If Alabama's votes were counted a different way, Richard Nixon would have had more votes than John F. Kennedy.
- 2000: George W. Bush beats Al Gore. Bush has 47.9 percent of popular vote, Gore had 48.4 percent.
In addition to those, there have been 14 elections in which the candidate who won the electoral college did not receive a majority of the popular votes cast, only a plurality of them. Those 14 are:
- 1844: Polk (49.6 percent).
- 1848: Taylor (47.3 percent).
- 1856: Buchanan (45.6 percent).
- 1860: Lincoln (39.8 percent).
- 1880: Garfield (48.3 percent).
- 1884: Cleveland (48.5 percent).
- 1892: Cleveland (46.0 percent).
- 1912: Wilson (41.9 percent).
- 1916: Wilson (49.3 percent).
- 1948: Truman (49.6 percent).
- 1960: Kennedy (49.5 percent).
- 1968: Nixon (43.4 percent).
- 1992: Clinton (43.0 percent).
- 1996: Clinton (49.2 percent).
As for the two elections that could not even be decided by the electoral college but had to be decided by the House, the first was the 1800 election that inspired the Twelfth Amendment. The only other election decided by the House was in 1824, when four candidates split the popular and electoral votes so evenly that none received majority. Andrew Jackson had the most popular and electoral votes, outpacing Adams, but the House elected Adams after Henry Clay, another presidential candidate who won 13 percent of the vote himself, threw his support to Adams, for which Adams made him Secretary of State.
Proposals for Change
In part because of such results, there have been hundreds of proposals over the years to replace the electoral college system with one by which the president is elected by direct popular vote. As a constitutional matter, such a change would require a constitutional amendment, and no major proposals have made it past Congress since the Twelfth Amendment.
In the 1960s, the American Bar Association condemned the electoral college as "archaic, undemocratic, complex, ambiguous, indirect, and dangerous," and instead proposed a direct-vote election which would provide for a run-off election if no candidate got more than 40 percent of the vote. This proposal - which would have encouraged third-party candidates - was endorsed by the House but did not make it out of the Senate for full consideration as a constitutional amendment. This proposal has occasionally been revived, such as in the late 1990s, but has not matched even the partial success of the 1960s.
Another proposal was made in the late 1970s by the Twentieth Century Fund. In this proposal, the winner of the popular vote would receive an additional 102 electoral votes (two for each state, and two for the District of Columbia). The electoral college system would still remain, but candidates would have an incentive for encouraging widespread voter turnout in order to win the bonus. This proposal did not go far, and was criticized for encouraging voter fraud.
Sources: The National Archives and Records Administration has much information about the electoral college on-line here; tables and charts were developed from the data therein. Lawrence D. Longley & Neal R. Peirce, Electoral College Primer 2000 (Yale University Press 1999). Gary L. Gregg, editor, Securing Democracy: why we have an electoral college (ISI Books 2001). House Subcommittee on the Constitution, Proposals for Electoral College Reform (held on September 4, 1997).
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