From the Advocacy Committee
October 7, 2024
The U. S. Electoral College, Explained
The American electoral college is a flawed system that undermines 21st-century democracy. Despite the ways that it elevates the political power of some Americans while marginalizing others, however, it remains our country’s system of electing the president.
The electoral college works by assigning a specific number of “electors” to each state, based on the state’s population. The formula is simple: for each state, take the number of Representatives from the U.S. House of Representatives, and add the number of U.S. senators (always 2). This formula necessarily awards more electors to states with higher populations. For example, California, the most populous state, receives 54 electors, while Wyoming, the least populous, receives only 3.
In 48 states, the electors vote as a “party bloc,” meaning each of them votes based on the results of the state’s popular vote. Therefore, all electors vote as one—if the Democratic candidate wins the popular vote in Wisconsin, all 10 of its electors will cast their vote for the Democrat.
Maine and Nebraska are exceptions to this rule, as both use a “split vote” process. Each state appoints an individual elector to each of their house districts, and two “at large” electors for the state as a whole. As each house district can vote either red or blue, this sometimes results in electors casting votes for both the Republican and Democratic candidates, as was the case in both states during the 2020 election.
A major reason why the founding fathers created the electoral college was because they feared a truly democratic society—the Constitution itself was not designed to respond to the will of the majority. The electoral college was explicitly designed to reduce the power of voting Americans (limited to white, male, property owners) from choosing their president directly.
But the electoral college had another foundation: southern slavery. Enslaved Black Americans were not U.S. citizens, but due to the Three-Fifths Compromise, they were counted toward the population numbers of each state. This benefited southern states by affording them additional representation in congress, despite the fact that large numbers of their populations were held in bondage.
Southern elites applied this same rationale when lobbying for the electoral college: counting enslaved peoples as part of the population afforded southern states greater numbers of presidential electors, giving those states disproportionate political power compared to their actual numbers of voting citizens.
In key ways, this undemocratic legacy lives on in the modern electoral college. The current system has a clear “small-state bias,” meaning that small states—with significantly smaller populations—retain disproportionate political power over larger states. For example, the population of California is 66 times higher than Wyoming, yet has only 18 times the number of electors. If the electoral college was truly representative of the population, these numbers would be equal.
This system inherently bolsters the voice of Republicans living in small, rural states, while marginalizing Democrats who often carry large, urban states. This explains why the Democratic candidate can win the popular vote, yet lose the election, as was the case in 2016.
The bias of the electoral college also, unfortunately, perpetuates racial disparities in voting power, as Black and Latino Americans more often live in urban parts of large states. Since the electoral college benefits small states, many voters of color find their vote matters less than their white counterpart in a small, rural state.
Given these disparities, support for the electoral college often falls along political lines: Republicans believe it should stay; Democrats think it should go. Even so, this divide is narrowing. In one 2024 poll, only 53 percent of Republicans said they favor keeping the electoral college, compared to 80 percent of Democrats. This inclination is not new. In the past 200 years, congressmen have unsuccessfully introduced more than 700 proposals to reform or eliminate the electoral college.
Quite simply, the electoral college is an unpopular system that creates a reality in which presidential elections do not accurately reflect the will of the American people. It is imperative that Democrats vote to counter the inherent bias of the electoral college.
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