Americans are gearing up for yet another contentious presidential election. And while nearly 155 million people across the United States voted in the 2020 presidential election, all eyes will be on seven key swing states to see whether the race tips to Vice President Kamala Harris or former president Donald Trump.
Why those seven states? A list that includes Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania? Those are the only true “battleground” states that will likely matter in the Electoral College, which determines the winner of the presidential election. While Americans have collectively received a heck of a civics lesson in recent years, a lot of concern and furor surrounds the Electoral College—which is not a college at all, of course, but rather a selection process.
The Electoral College is notable because it isn’t used anywhere else in the world and can result in a candidate winning the election even if they receive fewer overall votes (which happened in 2000 and 2016).
On election night, each state is worth a certain number of electoral “votes,” and the candidate who gets more than half—270 electoral votes—wins. Each state gets as many electoral votes as it has members of Congress in both the House and Senate. For example, Wyoming receives three electoral votes (two senators and one at-large House member), while California gets 54 (two senators and 52 House members).
Why do we have an Electoral College?
The Electoral College has its roots in the Constitution, and experts say the framers included it for a few key reasons. For starters, “they thought individual voters might not be well enough informed,” says Kermit Roosevelt, David Berger Professor for the Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, whose expertise includes constitutional law and conflict of laws.
Additionally, Roosevelt says that the founders thought that without the Electoral College, states could “feel pressure to expand their franchise,” meaning that states could grant the right to vote to specific populations (such as women) and give themselves greater importance. Roosevelt also says slavery was another reason it was devised.
“Southern states wanted some power for the enslaved population,” which is how we ended up with the “three-fifths compromise” at the time, giving Southern states more representation in Congress.
How Americans’ opinions on the Electoral College are shifting
Though we’ve been using the Electoral College for almost 250 years, it has led to some controversial outcomes in the past and generally focuses candidates’ attention on swing states.
“Basically, we’ve come down to a point where America says, ‘Okay, Pennsylvania, we’re stuck, so you pick,'” says Chris Stirewalt, political editor and anchor of The Hill Sunday on NewsNation.
Stirewalt found himself in a precarious position due to the Electoral College during the 2020 election when he was a political editor at Fox News. On election night that year, Stirewalt decided that the network would (correctly) call Arizona for Democrat Joe Biden—long before rival networks did. That decision was met with fury from Fox News viewers and even his coworkers, and though he was correct, is a situation that would not have materialized if the United States used a popular vote system to choose its president.
But Stirewalt says that it’s situations such as that one that have caused Americans to dislike the Electoral College system. “Democrats hate it because it has robbed them of victories that they thought were theirs,” he says. Stirewalt notes that it’s a big reason we see candidates holding curious positions. “Why does Donald Trump want to be the ‘father of IVF’? Why does Kamala Harris love fracking? It’s because of the Electoral College,” he says.
The data shows that Americans would support scrapping the system. Recent polling from Pew Research shows that, as of September 2024, 63% of Americans would prefer to move to a popular vote system rather than the Electoral College. That includes roughly 80% of Democrats and 46% of Republicans.
The case for and against abolishing the Electoral College
The clearest advantage of moving to a popular vote system, says Roosevelt, is “political equality.” That means that “A vote in California would be equal to a vote in Wyoming,” and effectively, get rid of swing states, forcing candidates to campaign nationwide. You’d see a lot more rallies in Seattle, Los Angeles, New York City, and Boston, for instance, as opposed to Tucson, Scranton, Eau Claire, and Grand Rapids. “A popular vote is the easiest, simplest, and fairest,” he says.
Stirewalt, though, disagrees. “Not only is the Electoral College not what’s wrong with our politics, but it could and should be a part of what fixes it,” he says. “The point of the Constitution is to protect political minorities—if you changed the way that we chose the president, it would have an effect on the electorate, too,” Stirewalt says. He adds that there would be a fundamental change in candidates’ motivations while campaigning, which could change how and where they campaign.
They’d still spend almost all of their time campaigning in large cities, where most voters are, which could still have rural voters feeling forgotten. He notes that one potential solution would be to modify the Electoral College to “the Madison plan,” devised by James Madison, which would allocate electoral votes at the district level rather than the state level. So, while California might vote Democratic on a state level, there are still millions of Republican votes in the states that are essentially “locked up.” Under a Madisonian Electoral College fix, those electoral votes could still be allocated.
“If we want to make changes,” Stirewalt says, “we should do it at the district level.”
Will we ditch the Electoral College?
While there may be some political will to change or move on from the Electoral College, it’s unlikely. It would take a constitutional amendment, which would require support from supermajorities in the House and Senate and the president’s signature. Given that Congress can barely pass a simple spending bill, that’s unlikely to happen any time soon.
If there is any realistic hope of changing or circumventing the Electoral College, it probably lies in the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC), an agreement among several states to pool and award their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote. If those states’ pooled votes are more than 270, then, effectively, the popular vote winner would also win the Electoral College. Earlier this year, Maine became the 18th state to join the Compact, bringing the Compact’s total to 209 electoral votes.
But Roosevelt says that we don’t actually know if the Compact itself is constitutional. So, it could be struck down by the Supreme Court if it were attempted to be enacted.
As such, we’re likely stuck with the Electoral College for the foreseeable future. If there’s anything we can do to improve it, says Stirewalt, it’s spending more time educating American citizens on their responsibilities as voters, and cultivating a better understanding of why we have systems like the Electoral College, and how they function.
“Being a citizen in a republic is hard work. Self-government is hard,” he says. “If there’s one thing that our schools should be doing it’s equipping people to be more effective citizens.”