What is the Electoral College and what is its role in the US elections?

Do not stop watching The controversy over the Electoral College 0:30

(CNN) - Americans who go to the polls on Election Day don't actually select the president directly.

They are technically voting for 538 electors who, according to the system established by the Constitution, meet in their respective states and vote for the president and vice president. These people, the electors, comprise the Electoral College, and their votes are counted by the President of the Senate in a joint session of Congress.

Why did the Constitutionalists choose this system?

There are a few reasons: First, they feared factions and feared that voters would not make informed decisions. They did not want to tell the states how to conduct their elections. There were also many who feared that the states with the largest voting populations would essentially end up electing the president. Others preferred the idea of ​​Congress electing the president, and at the time there were proposals for a national popular vote. The Electoral College was a compromise.

The stain of slavery is on the Electoral College as it has been throughout the history of the United States. The formula for distributing congressmen, which is directly related to the number of voters, was based at the time on Compromise 3/5, according to which each slave in a state counted as a fraction of a person to distribute seats in Congress. This gave the southern states with many slaves more power despite the fact that large portions of their populations could not vote and were not free.

• The U.S. Election Guide for (Non) Americans (2016)

How does it work

There is one elector for each member of the House of Representatives (435) and the Senate (100), plus an additional three for people living in the District of Columbia.

Each state gets at least 3 voters. California, the most populous state, has 53 congressmen and two senators, for which they obtain 55 electoral votes.

Texas, the state with the most reliable Republican leanings, has 36 congressmen and two senators, for which they garner 38 electoral votes.

Six states — Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming — are so small in population that they only have one congressman each, and the lowest three possible electoral votes. The District of Columbia also gets three electoral votes. Voters in Puerto Rico and other non-state territories do not obtain electoral votes, although they can participate in presidential primaries.

The states are in charge of selecting their own constituents. And several states do not require their constituents to honor election results, which has occasionally led to the phenomenon known as "voter without faith."

270 electoral votes are needed to obtain the majority of the Electoral College. The total number of voters, 538, cannot change unless more legislators are added on Capitol Hill or a constitutional amendment. But the number of voters assigned to each state can change every 10 years, after the Census established by constitutional mandate.

The number of congressmen is reassigned - that's the technical term - according to changes in the population. Some states get a House seat or two and others lose some. No state, however small, can have zero members of Congress. But this is why there has been a heated political debate about whether the US Census should ask if someone is a citizen. Some fear asking for it could make accurate population counting more difficult, or that states with lots of immigrants could end up with fewer legislators in elections starting in 2022, after the 2020 Census is complete.

What happens if there is a tie among the voters?

If there is a tie among the electors or if no one gets a majority, then the election goes to the House of Representatives. The delegation of legislators from each state gets one vote and they choose between the three main candidates for the electoral vote. Under the 12th Amendment, if no one gets a majority within a specified time, the vice president becomes president. If there is no majority for the vice president, the House delegations are excused and only the senators elect the vice president. The 20th Amendment changed the deadline from March 4 to January 20.

Most states (except Maine and Nebraska, which split some of their electoral votes) award all of their electoral votes to the person who wins the popular vote in that state. There are very democratic parts of Texas and very republican parts of California, for example. But unless those states move to distribute their electoral votes differently, what really matters is the state popular vote.

Who likes this system?

A popular voting system would certainly be easier to understand.

However, as Electoral College advocates point out, if you thought the recount in Florida in 2000 was distasteful, imagine a national recount of more than 130 million votes. That would be messy. And it could happen. Some states have automatic counts for elections that are separated by less than 0.1%. In 2016, with 136 million voters, that would have been a margin of around 136,000 votes. Can you imagine a tally in the 1960 election, which had a difference of less than 0.2% in total votes? In the end there was a solid Electoral College victory for John F. Kennedy.

One of the most important supporters is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has opposed the idea of ​​a national popular vote effort in the Senate.

Some defenders of the Electoral College have a racial tinge. Former Maine Governor Paul LePage said that without the Electoral College, whites will have less voice, which is rather sad considering that Compromise 3/5 helped create the Electoral College in the first place.

"Actually, what would happen if they do what they say they will do is that white people will have nothing to say," LePage said, according to reports.

«Only minorities will choose. It would be California, Texas, Florida. In all the small states like Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Wyoming, Montana, Rhode Island, you will never see a presidential candidate again. You will never see anyone on the national stage come to our state, "he said. «We will be forgotten people. It's a crazy, crazy process.

But 65% of Americans supported the selection of the president by popular vote, compared with 32% preferred by the Electoral College in a PRRI / Atlantic poll in June 2018. There is less support if the wording includes changing the Constitution. A Pew poll in March 2018 asked whether Americans supported amending the Constitution to select the president by popular vote and a smaller 55%, still a popular majority, supported the idea.

However, the Electoral College is written in the Constitution and changing the Constitution is very difficult. It takes years to accomplish and requires large majorities in Congress or state legislatures. States that currently benefit from the Electoral College would have to relinquish some of that power. The other possibility is something like the aforementioned agreement of the states to honor the winner of the national popular vote. But you can bet that if that proposal goes through, there will be lawsuits.

That said, the Electoral College has actually changed three times, each by constitutional amendment. The twelfth amendment, passed after the tied election of 1800 (read about this here) made voters vote for the president and vice president rather than for two people who could be presidents. The 20th Amendment put a time limit on the process. Amendment 23 granted voters to the District of Columbia.

And there was a serious move decades ago to abolish the Electoral College entirely. In 1968, a proposal to replace the Electoral College with a popular voting system was easily passed in the House. But it was obstructed in the Senate.

Elections in the United States