What the heck is Electoral College?

Watching the 2016 US presidential election results on Nov. 8 at the US embassy in Manila was a roller-coaster ride, with us, who had “adopted” Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton as our candidate, cheering as her votes catapulted upwards, then moaning, as they cascaded down to her defeat. What happened? Hillary had won, with two million plus votes cast in the nation-wide popular vote. But she lost to her rival, Republican candidate Donald Trump in the Electoral College.

What the heck is Electoral College?

To find out what Electoral College is all about, I had a chat with the US embassy’s press attache, Molly Koscina, and did research by Internet. Let’s not hold Ms Koscina responsible for my mistakes, if any, in understanding the American election process; my intent in writing about it the best way I can is to give readers an idea about the Electoral College.

For starters, it must be said that we elect our Philippine president by a national popular vote, ie., one vote for one candidate on election day, with the candidate getting the most number of votes declared as the winner, after which he is officially inaugurated as our president.

In the US, two elections are held – first, the popular vote in which qualified Americans vote for the candidates of their choice nationwide. Second, the Electoral College, in which “electors” from 538 states cast their votes, and the candidate getting the most number of votes is declared the official winner – not the one who garnered the biggest number of popular votes.

In the national popular voting, Clinton got 64,223,958 million votes, and Trump 62,206,395 votes – a difference of more than 2.2 million. But Clinton’s topping the popular vote did not mean she had clinched the American presidency. The Electoral College votes had to be cast and counted as to who was the real winner.

The Electoral College counts 538 electoral votes. A candidate must have 270 votes to be declared the winner. Trump garnered 290 votes, compared with 228 for Clinton. The result of the Electoral College voting was the official determinant of who won the race for the 45th president of the United States, in this case, Trump, who will be officially inaugurated on Jan. 20.

The Electoral College was established by the founding fathers in the US Constitution as “a compromise between the election of the President by a vote in Congress and election of the President by a popular vote of qualified citizens.”

As a writer puts it, “Despite popular belief, the US Constitution does not provide for the popular election of the American president. It provides for popular election of presidential electors. Each candidate who qualifies for a given state’s ballot must designate certain individuals who will serve as his or her electors if that candidate wins the popular vote in that state.

“When each state certifies a winner of its overall popular vote, that winner is entitled to send all his or her electors to that state’s Capitol, where they will officially record their votes for their candidate. All the electors in all the states do it on the same day, the first Monday after the second Wednesday of December.” (Last year it was Dec. 19.)

“In these proceedings in the states, the winner of the state-wide popular vote generally takes all the Electoral College votes, a rule stretching back to 1874.”

For the present, according to Wikepedia, here is how the Electoral College votes are apportioned to the states: each state is assigned a number equal to its Senate seats (always two) plus its seats in the House.

“That means the seven states with only enough population to qualify for one House seat will get three votes each in the Electoral College. California, with 53 seats in the House, gets 55 electoral votes, and Texas’ 36 seats means it gets 38 electoral votes.

“And that’s why, after the US expanded to include 50 states, the Electoral College had 535 seats, the same as the total of members of Congress (Senate and House). It now has 538 because in 1961 the 23rd Amendment to the Constitution added three for the District of Columbia, which had previously been without a voice in choosing the president (and which is still without a voice in either the Senate or the House).”

How are the electors chosen? My research showed that state legislators vary in their practice of nominating electors. In general, the electors are nominated by their state party committee (perhaps to reward many years of service to the party). They are voted upon at the state’s party convention, held sometime before the general election. On election day (Nov. 8), the voters in each state selected their state’s Electors by casting their ballots for President.

According to Wikipedia, when each state certifies a winner of its overall popular vote that winner is entitled to send all his or her electors to that state’s Capitol, where they will officially record their votes for their candidate. In the 2016 election, the electors in all the states did it on the same day, ie, on Dec. 19. On this date, the Electoral College votes showed that Trump got the winning 290 votes.

Usually electors are politically active in their party. They can include political activists, party leaders, elected officials of the state and even people who have personal or political ties to the presidential candidates. They must not be a member of Congress, a high-ranking US official in a position of “trust or profit,” and not engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the US.

Attempts were made to convince 37 Republican party electors to cross over and vote for Clinton. (If they agreed, they would be called “faithless electors.”) The intent was to reduce Trump’s votes to below 270, just enough to keep him below the threshold, in which case, the House of Representatives will have to make the decision on who is the next president. Throughout the history of the United States, our research showed, more than 99 percent of electors voted as pledged.

Eliminating the Electoral College does not require a constitutional amendment, says a group of reformists behind The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. This agreement among several US states and the District of Columbia seeks to award all their respective electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the overall popular vote. Once states totaling 270 electoral votes join the compact, which only requires passing state laws – then the next presidential election will be determined by the popular vote, not the Electoral College.

Multitudes of Americans have abhorred the Electoral College for generations. They claim that the fault was found from the start, with its “essentially anti-democratic concept that the people could not or should not be trusted to vote directly for a national leader.”   

This criticism says the Electoral College “reduces elections to a mere count of electors for a particular state, and that it may have a dampening effect on voter turnout: there is no incentive for states to reach out to more of its citizens to include them in elections because the state’s electoral count remains fixed in any event.”

Legal scholars Akhil Amar and Vikram Amar have argued that the original Electoral College compromise was enacted partially because it enabled the southern states to disenfranchise its slave populations, and encouraged the disfranchisement of women.

 References have indicated that over the past 200 years, over 700 proposals have been introduced in Congress to reform or eliminate the Electoral College. There have been more proposals for Constitutional amendments on changing the Electoral College than on any other subject. The American Bar Association has criticized the EC as “archaic” and “ambiguous” and its polling showed 69 percent of lawyers favored abolishing it in 1987. But surveys of political scientists have supported continuation of the practice. Public opinion polls have shown Americans favored abolishing it by majorities of 58 percent in 1967, 81 percent in 1968, and 75 percent in 1981.

For now, Americans have a new president, thanks or no thanks to the Electoral College.

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