Here’s how US presidents get elected (it’s not by winning the most votes)

If Americans could vote on the way they vote for president, polls suggest they’d dump it.

In the meantime, if all goes according to plan, 538 “electors” will yet again convene at locations around the country in December – several weeks after election day on 3 November – to officially select the next person to take the presidential oath.

The Electoral College is a mostly winner-take-all system that delivers a set number of electoral votes per state to the winner of the popular vote there. That number is based on a state’s headcount in Congress – the minimum is three (as in Alaska and Wyoming, for example), and the maximum is 55 (California). There are 538 in total, and 270 are needed to win.

The system was devised when voting was limited to white men who owned property, amid a fear of direct democracy. “If the manner of it be not perfect, it is at least excellent,” was how Alexander Hamilton described it. Still, it remains both a mystery to many and a target of criticism – not least because candidates can win the most total votes but still lose an election if they don’t win enough in the right states.

Candidates are compelled by the system to neglect the parts of the country where most people live. Each major political party already has an arsenal of (mostly) dependable electoral votes in the most populous states – Democrats in California, for example, and Republicans in Texas – so why campaign there if all one can do is lose by slightly less while still coming away with no electoral votes? Better to focus on a place like Ohio, which has evenly split its support between each party’s candidates in the past six elections, and has 18 electoral votes to add to an existing arsenal and nudge a winner over the finish line.

Maine and Nebraska are unique in that each can split their electoral votes, and while it’s not a state, Washington, D.C. contributes three.

Despite its quirks, the Electoral College system has weathered serious challenges. After the 1968 election, the Celler-Bayh Amendment proposed replacing it with a system based on the popular vote. The measure had broad support but died amid concerns about encouraging spoiler candidates and eroding the country’s federalist system.

The Electoral College can make a big difference for residents of less-populous states. That’s because the minimum of three electoral votes in even the least-inhabited state (each has at least two senators and one House member) gives each individual vote there more relative influence.

The parties in each state have different methods for selecting electors, or the people responsible for casting its electoral votes if their party wins the popular vote there. These electoral votes are ultimately sent to Congress for confirmation. Looming over everything is the spectre of the “faithless elector” – one who ultimately refuses to cast a vote for the pledged candidate. However, the Supreme Court ruled this past July that states have the power to force electors to cast their votes as expected.

Significant change may yet be on the horizon, however. An effort to work around the Electoral College by having states accounting for at least 270 electoral votes agree to cast them for the winner of the popular vote – dubbed the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact – has so far garnered commitments from 15 states and Washington, D.C.

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