Electoral College

Jan Grzywna

The upcoming U.S. presidential elections is the perfect time to take a closer look at how the President of the United States is actually elected. The process in described in Article Two of the United States Constitution and can seem pretty confusing at first. The main difference between the American and Polish presidential elections is the fact that in the USA the president is not chosen by popular vote, i.e. by the total number of individual votes. Instead, a group of presidential electors, called Electoral College, is formed and decides who becomes president.

Each state has a certain number of electoral votes, which is based on how many representatives it has in Congress. For example, California, a state with the highest population, has fifty-five electoral votes. Right behind it is Texas with thirty-eight votes. Smaller states like Wyoming, Delaware or New Hampshire only have three votes each.

The elections bring another layer of complexity. Most American states chose their electors on a winner-takes-all basis, which means that the candidate who wins the most votes in that state gets all of the state’s electoral votes. The two exceptions to this rule are Maine and Nebraska. They use a proportional system, where electoral votes can be split between the candidates based on the voting results in different districts. To win the elections, a candidate needs at least 270 out of all 538 electoral votes. If no candidate achieves majority of votes, then the House of Representatives elects the president from top three candidates, and the Senate elects the Vice President from the top two candidates. This process is called contingent election and it was used only three times in American history.

The reason for using the Electoral College goes back to when the U.S. Constitution was written. The participants of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 wanted a system that balanced the power between smaller and larger states, so they came up with the Electoral College. They didn’t want the president to be picked only by big, populated states like New York or California, which would leave smaller states without a voice.

Nowadays, one of the biggest problems with this system is that it can make a lot of people feel like their votes do not matter as much as those of other U.S. citizens. As most states use a winner-takes-all system, there are situations when the margin of victory is very tiny, e.g. 51% to 49%, and still the winner gets all electoral votes from that state. This means that if somebody lives in a state that always votes for one party, like California, which almost always goes Democratic, or Wyoming, which votes Republican, their vote doesn’t really change anything if they are in the minority. It also means that the result of the race in that state is already easily predictable, so candidates usually ignore it and spend all their time and money on ‘swing’ states, which are those parts of the country who vote for different parties each election cycle.

Another major issue with the electoral votes is that a candidate can win the presidency without winning the popular vote, which feels undemocratic. This happened seven times in American history, with most recent example in 2016, when Donald Trump won the election despite Hillary Clinton getting nearly three million more votes from the people. This kind of an outcome makes people question the fairness of the system.

The result of the U.S. presidential election does not always reflect what the majority of voters want as it would in ‘one person - one vote’ system. Instead, the candidate who wins the right combination of states can take the presidency even if fewer people overall voted for them. It’s frustrating for voters, especially if they’re in states that always lean toward one party, because it feels like their vote doesn’t matter much either way. Finally, when people see that the popular vote doesn’t always decide the outcome of the election, they question whether or not the US is a democratic country at all.