Candidates are chosen directly by the electorate in the U.S. elections. However, the President and vice president are not selected by the people. Instead, electors pick them up via a procedure known as the Electoral College. The Constitution is where the idea of utilizing electors originated. It resulted from a trade-off between a congressional vote and a popular vote by residents. Each state has as many electors as members of Congress in each state (Dautrich et al., 2020). There are presently 538 electors, including Washington, D.C.’s three electors. Each political party in a state selects its list of prospective voters. State-by-state variations exist regarding who is chosen, how, and when to vote.
A vote is subject to a statewide tally after being cast for President. The victor receives all of the electoral votes for that state in the remaining 48 states and Washington, D.C. The electors in Maine and Nebraska are distributed according to a proportional system. To win the presidential election, a candidate needs the support of at least 270 electors or more than half of all the United States electors. A projected winner is usually proclaimed on election night in November following voting. However, the Electoral College vote happens when the electors gather in their states around the middle of December (Chidubem et al., 2021). While the Constitution does not mandate it, several states require electors to support the candidate who won the popular vote in their state.
The Founding Fathers incorporated into the Constitution a compromise between electing the President through a vote in Congress and a popular vote of eligible individuals. The ancestors of the republic designed the Electoral College system as an ad hoc compromise between those who believed in the President being chosen by the House and Senate and those who believed in the popular election rather than as a direct outgrowth of eighteenth-century political principles (Hasen, 2022). Some of the founding fathers favoured direct elections, while others doubted the general electorate’s capabilities to assess the candidates’ credentials. It was particularly true considering the notion that voters would be selecting among a wide range of candidates from a distant location away before the two-party system emerged to narrow the field of possibilities.
There were two reasons why the Electoral College was established. The primary goal was to distance the general populace from the presidential election. The second was included in the government’s organizational framework and gave the smaller states more authority. Hasen (2021) posits that the Electoral College was proposed as a compromise in Federalist Paper 68 because it would filter the vox populi through men who were most qualified to evaluate the traits appropriate for the position while still allowing the sense of the people to guide the selection of the person to whom such a significant trust was to be confided.
The Electoral College was originally intended to be a group of men who might act as a check on the uneducated electorate. It does not imply that they were chosen as free agents with the power to disregard or invalidate the people’s will. Because of their propensity for ambiguity, the framers were unsure how to handle the issue of voters’ freedom of choice. There was undoubtedly some of it. The Constitution allowed the prospect of electors substituting their judgment for that of the citizens of their state (Chidubem et al., 2021).
Reference
Chidubem Iwuoha, V., Ngwu, E. C., Chidiebube Uche, J., Obikaeze, V. C., & Ononogbu, O. (2021). United States electoral diplomacy in foreign countries under President Barrack Obama: Nigeria’s experience in the 2015 election. African Identities, 1-18.
Dautrich, K.J, Yalof, D.A & Bejarano, C.E. (2020).The enduring democracy.CQ Press Sage ISBN.13: 978-1-544-36447-6.
Hasen, R. L. (2022, September). They are identifying and Minimizing the Risk of Election Subversion and Stolen Elections in the Contemporary United States. In Harvard Law Review Forum (Vol. 135, pp. 2021-50).
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