Electoral College

It seems like electing the president should be a pretty simple process. Everybody votes, and whoever gets the most votes becomes president, right? That method, called the popular vote, was one of several that the founding fathers of the United States considered when they made up the rules for presidential elections more than 200 years ago. They didn't pick the popular vote method, however. They went with an indirect system called the Electoral College.

Each state's number of electors for the 2004 and 2008 elections

It's easier to understand the Electoral College if you remember that it isn't really a national election -- it's a whole bunch of separate state elections. Each state gets a certain number of electors:

• one for each senator (which means two, because there are always two senators)
• one for each representative (which depends on the state's population as determined by the census)

In almost all cases (see "Winner Doesn't Always Take All" below), whichever candidate wins a given state wins all of that state's electoral votes, and it takes a majority of the electoral votes to win the overall election.

For more detailed information on the Electoral College system in the United States, see How the Electoral College Works.

Winner Doesn't Always Take All There are two states that don't follow the standard Electoral College practice of giving all of a state's votes to the winning candidate for that state. Instead of following what is known as the "winner-take-all system," Maine and Nebraska follow the "district system." In these states, two electors' votes are made based on the candidate who received the most votes statewide. The remaining electoral votes go by congressional districts, awarding the vote to the candidate who received the most votes in each district. This has been proposed on both a national and state level many times. One problem with this method is the complications involved in dividing up "parts of electors." Complicated rules are made as to when to round up or down and what threshold of votes a candidate needs to be eligible for any electoral votes at all. Some people have suggested that, if this were enacted on a national level, states could all simply multiply their number of electors by 100. That would make it easy to divide them up based on percentages.