In the latest episode of the Op-Docs series “Electoral
Dysfunction,” the political humorist Mo Rocca consults a third-grade class on
the fairness of the Electoral College.
By Bennett Singer,
David Deschamps and Leslie D. Farrell on Publish DateOctober 2, 2012.
By JONAH ENGEL BROMWICH NOV. 8, 2016／The New York Times
What is the Electoral College?
The Electoral College is a group of people
that elects the president and the vice president of the United States. (The
word “college” in this case simply refers to an organized body of people
engaged in a common task.)
As voters head to the polls on Tuesday, they
will not vote for the presidential candidates directly, in a popular vote.
Instead, they will vote to elect specific people, known as “electors” to the
college. Each state gets a certain number of electoral votes based on its
population.
The electors are appointed by the political
parties in each state, so if you vote for Donald J. Trump on Tuesday, and Mr.
Trump ends up winning the popular vote in your state, then electors that the
Republican Party has chosen will cast votes for him in their state capitals in
December.
The electors are asked to cast their votes on
the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December. This year, that’s Dec.
19.
But most people don’t pay attention to that
because, technically, it’s the election of the electors that matters. And on
Election Day, we’re electing the electors who elect the president. Got it?
How many electoral votes does it take to win the presidency?
It takes at least 270 electoral votes to win
the presidency. There are 538 electoral votes in all.
In 2008, CNN projected Barack Obama as the
winner of the presidential election after the then-senator skyrocketed from 220
electoral votes to 297 votes after results from some Western states, including
California, came in.
Has an elector ever ‘gone rogue’ or broken his or her promise? Would that be legal?
Yes, this has happened many times. There’s
even an insulting name for an elector who does so: a “faithless elector.”
But faithless electors have never affected
the final result of any presidential election. And there haven’t been many in
modern times; the last time was in
2004, when an anonymous elector in Minnesota cast his vote for John Edwards
instead of the Democratic candidate, John Kerry. (Other electors thought that
this might have been an honest mistake.)
More than a dozen states do not have laws on
the books to punish faithless electors, meaning that an elector could legally
change his or her mind and defy the popular vote. But according
to the federal archives: “Electors generally hold a leadership position in
their party or were chosen to recognize years of loyal service to the party.
Throughout our history as a nation, more than 99 percent of electors have voted
as pledged.”
Do electoral votes have a direct impact on Senate or congressional elections?
They do not.
How many electoral votes does each state have?
Every state gets at least three electoral
votes, because a state’s number of electors is identical to the total number of
its senators and representatives in Congress. Seven states have the minimum
three electors.
Washington, D.C., also has three electoral
votes, thanks to the 23rd Amendment, which gave the nation’s capital as many
electors as the state with the fewest electoral votes.
California has the most electoral votes, with
55. Texas is next, with 38. New York and Florida have 29 apiece.
Do all of a state’s electoral votes go to one candidate?
In every state except two, the party that
wins the popular vote gets to send all of its electors to the state capital in
December.
In the nonconforming Maine and Nebraska, two
electoral votes are apportioned to the winner of the popular vote, and the rest
of the votes are given to the winner of the popular votes in each of the
states’ congressional districts. (Maine has two congressional districts and
Nebraska has three.)
Has anyone ever won the electoral vote while losing the popular vote?
Yes, this has happened four times. (At this
point, people who were tuned in for the 2000 election are sneering at this
explainer.)
In 2000, Al Gore was found to have won the
popular vote by more than half a million votes, despite having lost to George
W. Bush in an election that was sealed by a
Supreme Court decision.
Andrew Jackson won the popular vote in 1824,
but eventually lost the election to John Quincy Adams. In 1876, Samuel Tilden
had more popular support than Rutherford B. Hayes, but lost the electoral vote.
And Grover Cleveland lost the 1888 election to Benjamin Harrison despite
winning the popular vote.
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