The Basics

As the U.S. has done for more than two hundred years, the 2024 presidential election will be decided by a small group of electors in a complicated and sometimes controversial process.

~ By Nate Davis, Amelia Perrin and Ian Proctor

In November 2016, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States despite receiving fewer votes than his opponent, Hillary Clinton. When it comes to electing the president, the United States is not a democracy. Instead, the president and vice president are elected using the Electoral College system.

Inscribed in the Constitution, it cements how the president of the United States is elected, and according to the National Archives, it was a compromise between having members of Congress select the president and putting it to the popular vote.

The Electoral College is made up of 538 electors — apportioned to each state based on its number of U.S. representatives and senators. California has the most with 54 electors, and Oregon has eight. The District of Columbia has three electors. The candidate who receives a majority of Electoral College votes, at least 270, wins the presidency.

A person votes for their candidate, but they are actually voting for the group of electors promised to that candidate.  It is a winner-take-all process in every state except for Maine and Nebraska. The candidate who wins the popular vote in the other 48 states wins all the electoral votes for that state.  

In 2016, Clinton won some states by large margins racking up a large popular vote total, while Trump narrowly won several states, including Michigan and Pennsylvania, that gave him the electoral victory.

“It wasn’t like the Founders said, ‘Hey, what a great idea!”

It’s a complicated system, with a complicated origin story.

Critics of the Electoral College, including Harvard University political scientist Gautam Mukunda, say that it gives smaller states too much power and disenfranchises larger states. “The fact that in presidential elections people in Wyoming have [nearly four] times the power of people in California is antithetical at the most basic level to what we say we stand for as a democracy,” he said in a 2021 NPR interview.

The Electoral College was born from compromise. “It wasn’t like the Founders said, ‘Hey, what a great idea!” said George Edwards III, professor emeritus at Texas A&M University. “They were tired, impatient, frustrated. They cobbled together this plan because they couldn’t agree on anything else,” he said in a 2019 History.Com story.

State rights, trust in the voter, and slavery were all part of the rancorous debate that ultimately led to the compromise we will use to elect our next president on Nov. 5 of this year.