What is the Electoral College?

by Will DeFour, age 15

Whether it be king, president, or prime minister, nearly every country has a leader. Some inherit the role, while others are chosen by the public. The United States has a more complex way of doing this, called the Electoral College.

After the country was formed, the Founding Fathers had to select a leader. There were many debates, the most heightened being about who should vote. Some believed that all adult white men with land should be able to vote. The rest believed that only Congress should cast votes. This disagreement founded the Electoral College.

Every citizen who was a white landowning male could cast a vote for president. The votes of each state were then tallied, and the winner would receive a certain number of electoral votes: one for each member of Congress from that state. However, Congress was determined based on the population of the state which, in turn, sparked even more debates, including how to count the population.

The institution of slavery in southern states added many more people to the South. These people, however, were not allowed to vote and worked all day with no pay and abusive treatment. Southern landowners said despite these conditions, enslaved people should count toward their state's population, adding to their seats in Congress and increasing their power in presidential elections. Most Northerners were against this, some because of the horrible institution of slavery, but many because they were worried about an imbalance of power in the South's favor. This led to the three-fifths compromise, a deal where each enslaved person was counted as three-fifths of a person. This dehumanized enslaved people even further and added to the power that enslavers held. The 14th Amendment abolished the 3/5ths compromise, in 1868, and Black men were given the right to vote in 1870.

Even now, the Electoral College can lead to some strange results. Five times in American history a candidate won the electoral vote but lost the popular vote. The first was John Quincy Adams in 1824, followed by Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, and Benjamin Harrison only 12 years later. This did not happen again for over a century, until George W. Bush in 2000. In the most recent example, Donald Trump lost the popular vote in 2016. If no candidate wins the Electoral College, the House of Representatives will decide the winner, with each state getting one vote. This has happened twice, once in 1800, and once again 24 years later. Additionally, throughout its two-and-a-half centuries, there has only been one man who has won with a unanimous vote: George Washington. However Franklin Delano Roosevelt. was eight away in 1936, during the Great Depression.

The Electoral College is how we determine the next U.S. president. It was formed by compromises and is one way the compromise of democracy lives on.

[Source: The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration; U.S. Vote Foundation; USA.gov; Bipartisan Policy Center; NPR]