The Decider: Understanding the Electoral College

By: Kate Monohan

Posted: 11/3/08

There is "no way" that Sen. John McCain will win the popular vote in this election, said Jeffrey Ladewig, assistant professor of political science. But does he need to do so in order to win the election? The answer is no. The Electoral College will be deciding the presidential election when they meet in early January.

How did this voting system even come about? According to Ladewig, the Connecticut Compromise placed the Electoral College into the Constitution to give small states equal power to the more largely populated ones - a part of what he called America's "unique political history."

Each state automatically gets two electoral votes because of the state's two senators. The remainder of the 438 electoral votes are split up according to population - in other words, the number of members of House of Representatives each state has is the number of electoral votes it gets plus two. Three of the 438 electoral votes are given Washington, D.C. In total, there are 538 electoral votes and to win, 270 or more votes are needed by a candidate.

Connecticut has seven electoral votes: two senators, and five members of House of Representatives, which are allotted based on population size. Populations for states are determined every 10 years through a census, the last of which was in 2000. Connecticut might lose an electoral vote after the next census since the state's population hasn't increased in proportion to the other 49 states, Ladewig said.

"Electors" are a group of people nominated by the parties in each state, according to the official U.S. Electoral College Web site. By law, electors can't be a senator or member of the House of Representatives.

Both the Democratic and Republican parties pre-select a group of people to be electors, and the party that wins in the state sends their electors to Washington, D.C., to vote for the president. For example, if a Republican candidate wins the most popular votes in a state, or the "plurality," the electors for that state are the ones that the Republican candidate has pre-chosen.

Only two states - Maine and Nebraska - don't abide by the "winner-take-all" law that exists in the other states. The other 48 states give all the electoral votes to the party that wins, whereas in Maine and Nebraska, the votes are split up according to the number of votes each candidate received, according to Ladewig. Approximately one-third of the states do not have consequences if the electors vote against the winner of their state, but the rest have punishments that vary by state. The only penalty in Connecticut, for example, is paying a fine, Ladewig said. However, according to the official U.S. Electoral College Web site, 99 percent of electors vote for the winner of the state's popular vote.

"Winner-takes-all" explains how George W. Bush won the 2000 presidential election over former Vice President Al Gore. By winning a few hundred more popular votes in Florida, Bush got all 27 of the state's electoral votes. This was the fourth time in history that a president did not win the popular vote, Ladewig said.

There are "battleground" or undecided states, which can mean the difference in the election. This year, Ohio, Florida, Missouri and North Carolina are still swing states.

According to Ladewig, the Founding Fathers imagined that the Electoral College's purpose was to act as a "levy system" to stop the wrong popular vote. He also explained that the small states were supposed to be given equal power, and that the House of Representatives was meant to grow exponentially, though it has remained at 435 members since 1910. This has been because of rural states worrying about greater power given to states with large cities that contained mostly new immigrants. If Congress had kept growing exponentially after 1920, then the number of electors would have increased by hundreds of members nationwide, and would allow smaller states a more equal influence.