The Electoral College
American voters don't directly elect a president or vice president. Instead, when a voter selects a candidate on their ballot, they're actually voting for a slate of electors to cast votes on their behalf. These electors together form a process known as the Electoral College.
The system came about as a compromise between Congress selecting a president and Americans directly electing the country's leader through a popular vote.
Article II, Section 1 of the United States Constitution lays out the system's foundation, with additional provisions in the Twelfth Amendment (1804). The Twenty-Third Amendment (1961) gave 3 electoral votes to Washington, D.C., whose residents have no voting representation in Congress.
The Electoral College is designed to give an oversized amount of influence to small states. Framers reached this compromise as a way to mollify the southern states, where enslaved people were counted as three-fifths of a person but had no voting rights. This increased the southern states' population numbers—and thereby their electoral votes—giving enslavers greater influence in a presidential election than voters had in free states.
There are 538 electoral votes apportioned between the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Electors are apportioned to the states based on the number of representatives they send to the United States House, plus one elector for each of their two senators.
Small states like Delaware and Wyoming are only allotted 3 electoral votes, while the largest state—California—casts 54 electoral votes.
The number of electoral votes a state casts can change slightly each decade as the Census notes population shifts around the country. States can gain or lose as many as 3 or 4 electoral votes if their population shrinks from one Census to the next.
State legislatures are tasked with deciding how to award a state's electoral votes. Originally, the legislatures took it upon themselves to vote for president—leaving voters out of the process—but that practice largely ended by the mid-1800s. The last election where a state legislature selected presidential electors was Colorado in 1876.
48 states (plus D.C.) award their electoral votes to the candidate who wins a plurality of the vote in that state. Nebraska and Maine split a portion of their electoral votes based on both the statewide winner and the winner in individual congressional districts.
A candidate needs 270 electoral votes to win the presidential election. Usually, the candidate who wins the national vote also wins in the Electoral College.
However, it's possible for a candidate to win the electoral vote without winning the nationwide popular vote. This most recently happened in 2016, when Donald Trump won 304 electoral votes despite losing the national popular vote by 2.09% to his opponent Hillary Clinton.
The 538 electors meet in their respective state capitals in the middle of December to formally cast their ballots. These ballots are certified by the state and sent to Congress, which meets in a joint session in early January to count the electoral vote and make the election results official.
Members of Congress can formally object to a state's electoral votes. This process is rarely used and it's meant for extraordinary circumstances. Objections were last used in 2020 during an attempt by Republicans to overturn the results of the presidential election, during which there was a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of outgoing President Donald Trump.
If no candidate wins an absolute majority of electoral votes, or if there's a tie, a contingent election takes place in the U.S. Congress.
The U.S. House of Representatives is tasked with selecting the new president in the event of a contingent election. Each of the 50 state delegations is awarded one vote. A candidate needs to win 26 state delegations' votes in order to win the presidency. This last happened in 1824.
The U.S. Senate is tasked with selecting the new vice president in the event of a contingent election. In the current 100-member senate, a candidate needs a simple majority of 51 votes to win the vice presidency. This last happened in 1837.
While slates of electors are usually composed of loyal party members who are thrilled to formally support their party's nominees, sometimes that's not always the case. Electors don't always vote for the candidate who won their state. These folks are known as faithless electors.
Most states (plus D.C.) require electors to abide by the popular vote, while some states like Georgia and Pennsylvania have no laws in place prohibiting or punishing faithless electors.
There have been 165 faithless electors since the first presidential election in 1788. As of 2020, faithless electors have never changed the outcome of an election.
93 of those electors chose someone else out of personal preference or by accident. 23 faithless electors in Virginia triggered a contingent election for the vice presidency in 1836; however, this didn't alter the final results.
The most recent case of faithless electors occurred in 2016 when 10 electors voted for someone other than their party's candidate for president.
During that election, five Democratic electors from Washington and Hawaii voted for candidates other than Hillary Clinton and her running mate Tim Kaine. Three more faithless Democratic electors from Colorado, Maine, and Minnesota were replaced under state law prohibiting faithlessness. On the other side of the aisle, two Republican electors from Texas voted for candidates other than Donald Trump and his running mate Mike Pence.
71 electors were faithless because a candidate died. This happened in 1872 after presidential candidate Horace Greely died, and again in 1912 when Vice President James S. Sherman died.
One faithless elector from Washington, D.C., abstained from voting in protest in 2000.