For a fleeting moment in early October, it seemed that America’s presidential electoral system could become a problem in this year’s elections. Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz told two audience members that the Electoral College should be abolished and replaced with a direct national popular vote.

Walz was quickly shut down by Kamala Harris’ campaign with a brief statement that abolishing the Electoral College is not his official position. Walz walked back his comments and the story had a shelf life of less than 24 hours.

But the Electoral College issue could come back to haunt the Harris campaign if this year’s election produces yet another president — if the loser of the popular vote wins the electoral vote and thus the election.

If the race is as close as most polls indicate, this is a possible outcome. And Republican former President Donald Trump is more likely than Harris to be the beneficiary of this archaic, undemocratic voting system.

How the Electoral College works

There is a two-stage indirect election for the president under the Electoral College system.

First, there is the popular vote on November 5 in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia to choose “electors,” who will formally cast the “electoral vote” on December 17 in what is known as the “Electoral College.”

It is the electoral votes that determine the president, not the votes of the people.

To complicate matters further, each state receives electoral votes based not on its population, but on its representation in the US Congress.

Each state has at least one member of the House of Representatives and two members of the Senate, meaning each state has at least three electoral votes regardless of population size.

There are 538 votes in the Electoral College, and an absolute majority of those – 270 or more – are needed to win. The Constitution also contains a complex and highly undemocratic emergency procedure in the event that no candidate wins a majority in the Electoral College. The president’s choice would then be decided by the House of Representatives, with each state delegation having only one vote.

The Origin of the Electoral College

It is not surprising that the Electoral College is an undemocratic institution; it was designed that way on purpose. The method of electing the president was an expression of a deeply conservative philosophy of government, embodied by most of the framers of the Constitution when they met in Philadelphia in 1787.

The framers were convinced that the presidency should be a position above politics. They also believed that the choice should be made by people with knowledge, experience and understanding of governance and statesmanship.

As such, the framers objected to a popular vote for president because they feared it would lead to what one of the founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton, called “tumult and disorder.” The framers were strongly opposed to direct democracy, preferring instead what they called a “republic.”

Their solution was to let state legislatures determine how to choose each state’s electors. In the beginning, most states’ legislatures chose electors to decide who became president—not the people.

The structure of the Electoral College – and its philosophical underpinnings – was then locked into the Constitution and deliberately designed to exclude the people from the process.

It has also been argued that race and slavery were integral to its design. By piggybacking on the already agreed-upon compromise on representation in Congress and counting slaves as “three-fifths of all other persons,” the framers of the Constitution gave the major slaveholding states much more influence, not just in Congress, but also but also in the choice of the president.

In the longer term, the framers were not entirely successful in their efforts, as two major political developments in the early 19th century forced some adjustments to the model.

As the American frontier expanded and political parties developed, people began to demand a greater role in American democracy. This put pressure on state legislatures to relinquish their power to select electors and instead allow popular voting for the Electoral College.

By the mid-19th century, the Electoral College functioned in much the same way as it does today.

Surprisingly, this did not require a constitutional amendment, because the wording of the Constitution gave the states flexibility to respond to the demand for plebiscite:

Each State shall appoint, in such manner as its legislature shall determine, a number of electors…

But that did not change the fact that it was still the “voters” who would choose the president, and not the people directly.

How the Electoral College Twists the Popular Vote

The electoral vote always distorts the popular vote by exaggerating the winner’s margin of victory. In very close battles, it can also go against the popular vote, as it has done four times: in 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016.

Two mechanisms are responsible for this.

First, the populations of small states are overrepresented in the Electoral College compared to larger states due to the guaranteed minimum of three electoral votes.

For example, Alaska, with three electoral votes, has one electoral vote per 244,463 residents (based on 2020 U.S. Census data). In contrast, New York, with 28 electoral votes, has one electoral vote per 721,473 residents. An electoral vote in Alaska is therefore worth almost three times as much as an electoral vote in New York.

Secondly, and much more importantly, there is the winner-takes-all arrangement. In every state except Maine and Nebraska, the winner of the popular vote gets 100% of the electoral votes, no matter how close the battle.

Even in Maine and Nebraska, it’s winner-take-all, except that those states award two electoral votes to the winner of the statewide popular vote and one electoral vote to the winner of the popular vote in each of the congressional districts.

Few Americans are also aware of how the winner-takes-all system works.

Simply put, when voters vote, they are essentially voting multiple times – once for each voter in the state who supports the presidential candidate of their choice. They do this by checking just one box next to the name of their preferred candidate.

For example, if Harris beats Trump with 51-49% of the vote in Pennsylvania, each of the 19 electors on Harris’ list will defeat each of Trump’s 19 electors by the same margin. The popular vote may have been close, but the electoral vote is 19-0 for Harris.

When this is repeated in all fifty states, the Electoral College vote will always exaggerate the margin of victory compared to the popular vote.

For example, in the 1992 presidential election, Bill Clinton defeated George HW Bush in a landslide in the electoral college, 370-168. However, Clinton only defeated Bush by 5.5 percentage points in the popular vote (43% to 37.45%). Independent candidate Ross Perot, meanwhile, won almost 19% of the vote, but because he had no states, he received zero electoral votes.

And when the loser of the popular vote wins the electoral vote, such as Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016, it shows that the total number of popular votes won by a candidate is less important than where those votes are located.

To win in the Electoral College, a candidate must economically distribute his vote among the states. In a majority democracy (based on the principle of majority rule) this should not be a feature of the electoral system. But the U.S. presidential election process was never designed to function this way.

Finally, the Electoral College also largely determines the nature of the election campaign. Most states in the US are “safe” wins for one party or the other.

As such, the candidates’ efforts are concentrated in the handful of states that are competitive – the so-called “battleground states.” The rest of the country is mostly ignored.

The future of the electoral college

The survival of the Electoral College into the 21st century is partly due to the Constitution’s adaptability to meet the earlier challenge in the 19th century over the selection of state voters, and to the enormous difficulty in To amend the Constitution.

This is despite the fact that a clear majority of Americans support the abolition of the Electoral College in favor of a national, direct popular vote for the presidency.

What happens in these elections is anyone’s guess. With polls showing such narrow margins in the battleground states’ popular vote, the outcome is not only unpredictable, it could even be arbitrary. And that’s a terrible comment on the state of American democracy.