MGA Faculty Q&A With Dr. Christopher Lawrence: Understanding The Electoral College

Author: Sheron Smith
Posted: Tuesday, October 22, 2024 12:00 AM
Categories: Faculty/Staff | School of Arts and Letters | Pressroom

Macon, GA

Image: Cambri Steadman

The Electoral College is a group of representatives, called electors, who are chosen by each U.S. state to formally cast votes for the president and vice president of the United States. The number of electors a state has is based on its total number of its senators and representatives in Congress. In most cases, electors cast their votes for the candidate who won the popular vote in their state. The Electoral College is a unique feature in U.S. democracy that was more or less intended to balance power between states. In 2024, the number of electoral votes needed to win the presidency is 270.

At times, the Electoral College ends up producing a president that did not win the popular vote nationwide. For that reason and others, the Electoral College is one of the most debated and often misunderstood aspects of the U.S. presidential election process. While it has shaped the course of American politics for over two centuries, many citizens are unsure of why it was created or how it functions today.

To offer some perspective on this complicated issue, we turned to Dr. Christopher Lawrence, professor and chair of the University's Department of Political Science.

What is the origin of the Electoral College, and why was it created?

At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, the framers of the Constitution decided to replace the existing constitution at the time, the Articles of Confederation, with a new document that created a fundamentally different system. Under the Articles, there was no executive presidency that exercised power independent of the Congress, but after numerous debates at the convention the framers settled on a system with three interdependent branches of government: the legislative branch (with two chambers in a new Congress), the executive branch (headed by the president), and the judicial branch. So they needed systems to select the officials who would take on all of these responsibilities.

At the same time, they were also skeptical of unchecked, mass democracy, so they wanted to limit the impact of popular passions on government, and did so by initially making only one of the two chambers directly elected (the House of Representatives); the Senate’s members would be chosen by state legislatures (until the early 20th century, when the 17th Amendment changed this), and the president would be indirectly elected via the use of presidential electors, with the caveat that if a majority of electors didn’t agree on a candidate then there would be what we call a “contingent election” in the House and Senate to decide the presidency and vice-presidency, respectively. The state legislatures would each decide how these electors would be chosen.

Notably, the term “Electoral College” never appears in the Constitution, but it’s become the shorthand to refer to the body of electors, even though to this day they never meet as a single body with all 538 electors in one room; instead, they meet separately, by state, a few weeks after the election, typically in their state capitol buildings.

How did the framers of the Constitution envision the Electoral College working in practice? Has it evolved over time?

The short answer is we really don’t know how the framers thought the Electoral College would work in practice in the long term. In the short term, they knew the electors would choose George Washington to be the first president and allow him to serve as long as he wanted until he decided to retire, but after that their projections were a bit hazy. The Constitutional Convention was held before political parties existed in a form we would recognize today, so there was no expectation that a majority of electors would back common candidates across the country after Washington left the scene. In Federalist No. 68, Alexander Hamilton describes the electors as being selected by their states to exercise their own judgment when meeting in their state capitals, rather than being “pledged” to support a particular candidate as they are now.

I think the best explanation is that they thought the electors would nominate strong candidates from their own states or neighboring states, and since there wouldn’t usually be enough consensus from across the country for any candidates to win outright, the House and Senate would then pick a president and vice president from the most popular candidates who had gotten electoral votes from various parts of the country. This explanation is reinforced by the rule that the individual electors couldn’t pick two people from the same (presumably their own) state.

Whatever was intended, this system broke down very quickly. During Washington’s presidency, two major factions emerged in American politics who had fundamental disagreements about domestic and foreign issues that eventually coalesced into the first two major parties, which we today call the Federalist Party and the Democratic-Republican Party. The nascent Federalists backed Vice President John Adams in the 1796 presidential contest while the Democratic-Republicans supported former Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson instead. Under the rules at the time, which provided that each elector had two votes and the second-placed candidate became vice president, Adams became president and Jefferson became vice president despite being political rivals, which set up a bitter rematch in 1800 that broke the original Electoral College completely. Jefferson prevailed this time (after some bitter political machinations in Congress) and the 12th Amendment in 1803 changed the Electoral College to adopt the system as it works today, where electors have distinct votes for president and vice president; they also slightly changed the rules regarding contingent elections to reflect the separate presidential and vice-presidential votes.

Over time, in most states the legislature decided to allow the voters to choose the electors and those electors had usually pledged to vote for their own party’s national nominee. By the 1830s almost every state had moved to have electors chosen by the voters using some form of popular vote, with South Carolina being the last holdout; the legislature itself chose South Carolina’s electors until after the Civil War.

Can you explain why the Electoral College doesn't always align with the popular vote?

The simplest explanation is that candidates win the same number of electors in the 48 winner-takes-all states and the District of Columbia whether they win the most votes in that state by one vote or by millions of votes. (The rules are slightly different in Maine and Nebraska, where two of the electors are chosen statewide and the rest are allocated based on who wins each congressional district, but the same principle applies, just a little bit differently.) So if a candidate wins California or Texas by several million votes, those “extra” votes don’t really help them in other states.

Candidates who do better in smaller states also have a bit of an advantage since every state has at least three presidential electors, regardless of its population, so winning small states doesn’t require as many votes per elector as winning big ones do; at times, both major parties have benefitted from this effect but in recent elections Republicans have tended to do better in smaller states and so they gain a bit of an advantage from this effect.

Have there been significant efforts to reform or abolish the Electoral College, and what are the arguments for and against?

There have been discussions on and off about reforming or abolishing the Electoral College. The states themselves can decide on different rules for choosing their electors. As noted above, Maine and Nebraska decided to use a hybrid system where the winner of the statewide vote gets 2 electors and then the winner in each congressional district gains an additional elector; other states could adopt a similar system, although the evidence suggests that adopting this change probably wouldn’t have made a big difference in recent presidential elections. There have also been suggestions that states should award their electors in proportion with the share of the vote the presidential candidates receive in the state; again, the evidence is that this probably wouldn’t have made much of a difference in most recent elections. However, either change would at least make it so fewer votes are “wasted” in states that aren’t competitive statewide.

Abolishing the Electoral College has also been considered on occasion. After the 1968 presidential election, Congress considered a constitutional amendment that would have replaced the Electoral College with a direct popular vote system that would have required a run-off election between the top two candidates if the leading candidate candidate received less than 40% of the popular vote; the Bayh-Cellar Amendment, as it was known, passed the House of Representatives with the needed two-thirds majority to be sent to the states for ratification but it ultimately failed in the Senate. More recent amendment proposals have failed to advance as well.

In recent years a number of states have signed onto the “National Popular Vote Interstate Compact” (NPVIC) that would commit the states in the compact to award their electors to whoever wins the national popular vote, regardless of who wins their own states; it would take effect if enough states with a majority of electoral votes or more combined joined the compact. The NPVIC would bypass the Electoral College and create a direct popular vote system (without a run-off provision) on top of it. As an interstate compact, it also would probably require Congress to vote to approve it before it could go into effect.

A commonly heard argument for the Electoral College and against directly electing the president is that it would lead presidential campaigns to ignore small states. However, the reality of modern campaigns is that presidential candidates already ignore almost all of the small states, and many of the bigger ones as well, as they only tend to focus on the small number of “battleground” states that have a non-negligible chance of being won by either major-party candidate.

There are a few better arguments, but they are not commonly used by proponents of keeping the Electoral College. First, the Electoral College arguably lowers the cost of campaigns since the presidential candidates, parties, and interest groups don’t need to spend money in, or be as organized, across the whole country. Second, the Electoral College avoids the need to make every state have essentially identical rules for voter eligibility and registration; while the rules in most states are similar, there are still differences regarding questions like whether felons and currently-incarcerated persons can vote, and in a national vote some states might want to enfranchise additional populations so they can have more influence on the outcome of the election (for example, by lowering the voting age, the largest states could add millions of potential voters to the rolls overnight). Finally, if we adopted a direct popular vote, we’d probably also have to decide whether the millions of U.S. citizens who are residents of territories like Puerto Rico and Guam, who do not have any say in presidential elections today, also should be allowed to vote in presidential elections. (The NPVIC would not include any votes from U.S. territories.)

I think the best and most obvious argument for directly electing the president is that as a matter of general principle most Americans think that whoever gets the most votes in an election should win that election, and as discussed above people usually only complain about the Electoral College when it doesn’t result in the candidate who won the most votes winning. As noted millions of Americans will cast their vote in this election and because they’re Republican voters in California or Massachusetts or Democratic voters in Florida or Texas, their votes almost certainly won’t actually make any difference in the outcome of the election just because they don’t live in a competitive state, which seems antithetical to the whole idea of representative democracy on its face.

While there would be practical challenges with implementing switching to a popular vote system, and I think in the short term it would be difficult to advance that change since based on recent election results Democrats think a direct popular vote would be to their advantage and Republicans think it wouldn’t, if enough states join the NPVIC it may force the issue.