Electoral College

Electoral College

The United States Electoral College is the group of Presidential Electors who are chosen every four years to cast the electoral vote and who are in charge of electing the President and Vice President of the United States. State officials administer the actual meetings of electors in every state. The Electoral College consists of 535 people who are responsible for voting for their state. The number of electoral votes is based on the number of U.S. Senators and U.S. Representatives in each state. Small states like Delaware, Vermont, and South Dakota are only given 3 electoral votes. The state with the most electoral votes is California with 54. The candidate who wins the most votes on Election Day gets all the states electoral votes; to win the White House, 270 are needed.

Electoral College, America's method of electing Presidents, has come under fire in the aftermath of the presidential election in 2000. That election was the first in more than a century to have such a difference between the pouplar and electoral vote outcomes. Today's unenthusiastic views on the Electoral College would surprise the founding generation as they thought it to be one of the paramount achievements of the Constitutional Convention.

American presidential elections are administrated by a national tally of states' electoral votes, instead of individual votes. State legislatures have to determine the method by which their representatives in this national election, referred to as electors, are chosen for their states. All states now rely on a popular election for the selection of electors. 48 states and the District of Columbia award their entire slate of electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis. Maine and Nebraska allot electors based partially on the state vote winner and partly on congressional district results.

The Electoral College also has the benefit of tending to enlarge the margin of victory for presidential candidates, removing doubt from elections that are close in the popular vote. Also the Electoral College controls fraud in presidential elections, although it cannot be completely ridden of. The Electoral College achieves this purpose by isolating problems to one or few states.

Two commonly proposed alternatives to the Electoral College would allocate votes either by congressional district or proportionately, based on the outcome in each