Electoral College, Explained

Think you already know how the Electoral College works? We go past the headlines to unpack why the system blends popular voice with state power, how states gained wide discretion over electors, and why most adopted winner-take-all rules. With Dr. Sean Beienberg, we trace the original “filtering” idea, show how party pledges transformed elector behavior, and examine the math that makes electoral-popular vote splits more likely when the House size is capped.

We also stress-test the biggest critiques. Are today’s big–small state gaps unprecedented? The historical record says otherwise, with past ratios far exceeding modern spreads. Do small states reliably tilt to one party? The data across multiple cycles shows a mixed picture. And if fairness means strict vote-to-outcome symmetry, compare recent results in Canada, Australia, and the UK—systems that often produce far larger seat-vote distortions than any Electoral College divergence.

On the practical side, we clarify what your ballot really selects (slates of pledged electors), why “faithless electors” rarely matter, and how Maine and Nebraska’s district methods differ from winner-take-all. We dig into incentives that keep most states from going proportional and highlight a quiet benefit of federalism: disaggregated elections reduce single-point failure risk and force nationwide coalition-building. If you want a clear, grounded grasp of how the Electoral College functions—and where reform debates should focus—this conversation delivers clarity without the noise.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Stage: Today’s Focus
• 2:36 What It Is And How It Works
• 4:26 State Control Over Electors
• 7:26 Allocation Logic And Federalist 39
• 11:01 House Size, Math, And Disjuncture
• 13:56 History Check: Big Vs Small States
• 18:06 Party Balance In Small States

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:46

Welcome back to Civics in the Year. Today we are talking with Dr. Sean Bienberg about what is the Electoral College and how does it work? We do have a previous episode going more into the Federalist paper on the Electoral College, but this one is more of the what and the how. So, Dr. Beyenberg, what is the Electoral College and how does it work?

unknown: 1:10

Right.

SPEAKER_01: 1:10

So, as you alluded to, this one's a parallel or a compliment, I should say, to episode 51, where we talked about sort of how the founders understood the Electoral College. And just as a one-sentence recap on that, it was supposed to be a filtering mechanism to ensure that competent, steady, in some cases almost boring people end up being filtered up to be the competent administrators of the United States. Again, under the assumption that the president is wielding executive power and foreign policy power, but not sort of policy-making authority. And so, as I talked about in the last session, the electoral college has effectively two features. One is the selection process, which we covered in that earlier podcast. And so today I want to concentrate a little more on the allocation of the electors. So the constitution leaves it to the state's discretion as to how they choose the electors. And some states use the state legislatures just directly picking people out. Most of them very quickly turned to more or less direct elections by their citizens, doing advisory electors, but basically picking who that would be. And that became the norm and is still basically the norm in pretty much all of the states today. There's a little variation in terms of some of the states do winner take all. Most of the states do win or take all. A few of the states put a little bit more of a complicated formula where some of the electors that they're allotted are allocated by district. But the constitution is very, very hands-off in terms of how the states designate their electors. They just basically are given a quantity, which I send a formula I'll talk about in a second. And then they effectively send them up the chain. So in practice, the electoral college's selection process, I would say, has sort of fallen away. It's consistent with the text of the Constitution, but the sort of expected application, the sort of expected logic of it, in some sense, is one that we haven't followed for a long time. And I don't think this shows a failure of the Constitution. In some sense, I think it shows a positive feature of it, that that part was written to be flexible. So as we got to particularly, I would say unfortunately, as the president has taken on more policy-making authority, the case for it having a more direct popular influence grows. So I think the thing that people are more interested in and they talk about more with the Electoral College is the allocation of it. And just in terms of the actual mechanics of it, remember the allocation follows the logic of Federalist 39, which is the one I keep coming back to, but that's the one that mostly outlines the relationship between the states and the federal government. And in this case, that the United States is a mixed federal and national system. And so the way that the president is chosen is combining the House of Representatives' population allocation and the Senate's per state equality allocation. And the Constitution, it's worth emphasizing, doesn't say how many members of Congress there must be. The actual House of Representatives size is itself dictated by Congress. And they used to change it as the population would grow and more states would get added. Part of the reason that we see sometimes a disjuncture between the Electoral College and the so-called national popular vote or the aggregation of all of the votes is because we quit increasing the House of Representatives for good reason, the size eventually becomes so unwieldy that you can't have meaningful conversation. But the the that creates a little bit of sort of a mathematical tweak where you can have a bit of a more of a disjuncture that you wouldn't have had happen. But I do want to emphasize that because the Electoral College, I think, is one of the more criticized parts of the U.S. Constitution. So I want to say a little bit sort of in its defense or at least explaining its logic. And much of this actually tracks also with critiques of the United States Senate. In some ways, these are both together, which is effectively isn't it seem weird that we didn't just aggregate it and collect the national preferences? Why are the states getting such a strong influence? Or the sort of pithyist version of this is why does Wyoming count so much more than California? And I think that that critique, I think, is a little less biding if one has both a broader sense of history as well as, and I think this is important, a broader sense of how politics works in the rest of the world. So, for example, the two main critiques that we see against both the Electoral College and the Senate are that it's particularly unrepresentative are this moment. The founders could never have envisioned a moment where the gap between the big state and the small state is so large. But if you go back and actually look through United States history, we are actually in somewhere between average to below average in terms of the disparity between the largest state and the smallest state. So at the founding, it's true, Virginia has 11 times what Delaware does. But if you look in 1860, New York compared to Oregon, biggest state to the smallest state, is a 74 to one population ratio. In 1900, New York to Nevada is 171 to one. And basically Las Vegas is unsettled at this point. So imagine Nevada minus Las Vegas, right? So 171 to one. 1940, New York to Nevada again, 122 to one. Whereas in 2020, if we do the California to Wyoming thing, it's 68 to one, which is between a half and a third, sort of what it had been at other periods. And I think it's striking that that number is going to collapse because California is slated to lose population. And therefore, I think the projections have it losing four or five seats next go-around. And Wyoming's population has increased. So just as a historical matter, I think the sort of this is unprecedented in American history to have it's actually not. The gap is larger than at the founding, but smaller than arguably most of American history, and it's going to continue compressing. So I just think that both the critique of the Senate and Electoral College on that ground is a little more complicated if you have some more historical context. A kind of related point that one sees is that the smaller states tend to be proportionally very conservative or Republican-leaning. And so therefore this creates sort of a structural advantage. If one were to pick, for example, a completely arbitrary year like 2024, the if you look at the 15 states with the fewest people, six of those states sent two Democratic senators, six of the states sent two Republicans, and three sent one of each. That is to say it's literally 100% balance among the 15 smallest states. The Electoral College disjuncture, as it is, is basically that Republicans tend to do a little better in some of the medium-sized seats, but the actual smallest seats in terms of the US population is almost about equal. And that's not just me picking some one random time period. If you look at 2001, so the 107th Congress, those 15 smallest states, six of them sent two Democratic senators, five of them sent two Republicans, four of them sent one of each. If you go back to 2009, 2010, admittedly that was a good year for Democrats in the wake of Barack Obama's coattails. Eight of the smallest 15 states sent two Democratic senators. Only three sent two Republicans, and four sent one of each. So that is to say, I think it takes, I think that I'm I have skepticism of saying we need to radically change some fundamental institution of the American constitutional order because of one or two elections for patterns that may not hold. So uh just a little historical perspective, I think, makes makes the makes that critique a little less biting. And I would say similarly, in terms of looking at comparative politics, people say, well, it's got me better in other countries. If you look at, and I think the probably fairest comparison would be the English-speaking countries that sort of spun out of England that have similar traditions of liberal constitutional democracy. So if you go back and look at the last couple elections from there, I would suggest that they arguably have a greater disjuncture than what people seem to think they want in America, than say the 2016 election, where it was basically pretty close to a tie in terms of the popular vote, and Trump won slightly in terms of the electoral vote. So if you look at the 2021 election in Canada, the Conservative Party won 30, about 34% of the plurality vote or of the vote. The labor party, excuse me, the Liberal Party won 33%. So the Conservatives won by about a percentage and a half. The way that translated in terms of seats in the legislature, which again, remember, they don't have a president, so that also is means control of the executive branch. The Liberal Party, despite winning 32%, got 160 seats. The Conservative Party, despite getting about 34%, had 119 seats. That's a, I would say, a much bigger disjuncture than we've seen in any electoral college sort of dis switch from the popular vote in the United States. In Australia, in the 2022 election, uh, they used this complicated runoff model. But if you look at just what the first vote was, the Liberal Party, which in Australia is the Conservative Party, because they use classical Liberal, the Liberal Party won on the first vote about 36% of the vote. And the Labor Party won about 33% of the vote. But by the time they ran the runoff, the Labor Party actually ended up in power. But I think the really most striking and interesting one on this is in the United Kingdom in the 2024 elections. And I don't know if this is one that you've followed at all, but in 2019, the Labor Party won 32% of the vote, which translated to 31% of the members of parliament. So the Tories ended up with more. In 2024, the Labor Party won 30, about 34% of the votes. So they picked up about 2%, and they ended up with 63% of the members of parliament. Overwhelming power to basically do whatever they want off of 33% of the vote. And I've always been surprised that the sort of the critics of the electoral college haven't been losing their mind over sort of what in the United Kingdom is you win a third of the vote and get two-thirds of the seats. That's really striking. And so I would just sort of encourage folks who are particularly frustrated by the Electoral College in the Senate to sort of take a perspective that's a little broader in history and that also understands the way politics works in the rest of the world. And what you'll see that the US system basically tracks together, and to the extent that it doesn't, it's a slight, it's maybe it's not an anchor, maybe a slight thumb on the scale to recognize that we have a federal system and that that's important.

SPEAKER_00: 12:26

So when I get my ballot, and I've only voted in the state of Arizona because I turned 18 here, only have voted here. When I get my ballot during presidential years for Arizona, I'm not necessarily voting for candidate A or candidate B. I'm voting for the electors that go to do the vote, right?

SPEAKER_01: 12:47

So yeah, the way that the ballot is written is it says effectively who the president is, but then it'll sort of have a little note below it of the electors who are pledged to vote for that person. Now, um, some of the states have tried to impose penalties on so-called faithless electors. So if you go back and look at the 2016 election, there were a few, I think they were mostly like Hillary Clinton people that voted for other sort of progressive candidates once it was clear that it wasn't gonna work. There have always been, but there have often been a couple of these sort of provocateur electors. Certainly is not gonna, you get to be an elector basically by being popular with your local party. You know, you've been a longtime donor or a party worker or whatever. That kind of a provocative gesture means you're probably not gonna be an elector the next time. But yes, officially, legally speaking, under the constitution, you are just voting for a state, a slate of electors who have pledged to vote for that presidential candidate, but they are not required to. So that's where we still see the formal logic of the original constitution. But uh, and you did see in 2016 this kind of interesting movement by a lot of critics of nominally president-elect Donald Trump saying we should revive Hamilton's old system and you should pronounce yourself Hamilton electors and choose a different candidate altogether because you legally have the authority to do it. And that's true, but they did legally have the authority to do it. But it certainly wouldn't would have been sort of in tension with the last 200-ish years of American political practice. I guess about 170 if you want to exclude the last couple of states that were holdouts and the legislature directly elected. But that's right. The ballot will say, just as a short version, who the president is. But if you sort of look at the longer version, it'll actually have a list of names of to whom you are voting as the pledged electors. And those are chosen by your local party.

SPEAKER_00: 14:45

And in the state of Arizona, all of our electoral votes go to one candidate. Whereas I believe Nebraska. And Maine is the other one. Maine is the other one. Yeah. So every state gets to choose because election laws are state-specific. So again, when I'm talking about Arizona ballots, it's because I've only voted in the state of Arizona. So I've been a resident here for 40 years, but states get to make that decision. And here in the state of Arizona, all 11. It is 11, right? Now I'm like questioning. I think it's 11.

SPEAKER_01: 15:22

I think it's right. I think it's 11 right now. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 15:25

Well, if it isn't, then I'm wrong. But I'm pretty sure it's 11 because we have nine people in the House of Representatives. We have our two senators, and that is our 11 electoral votes. And that is just states. Do territories get to submit electoral votes?

SPEAKER_01: 15:44

Territories do not get to submit electoral votes. Territories do get to participate in the primaries. And so in the primary elections, they get to sort of make an influence on that. But that's because the parties are ultimately the ones who are doing that. I mean, there's a kind of complicated constitutional law about to what extent the parties are exercising state authority in running primaries and so vice versa. But that's right. The territories do not get electors. Washington, D.C. only gets electors because of a specific constitutional amendment that was proposed in the mid-20th century. There was a proposal later on to basically revive revoke that amendment and effectively give them statehood by constitutional amendment. That didn't uh get ratified by the states. It's one of the very few amendments that didn't. We'll talk more about amendments in another podcast. But that's correct. So in Arizona and most states, it's winner-take all. There's nothing conceptually stopping a state from even using proportional representation. It's not to the advantage of a state to do it because you know if you're Arizona and you switch to proportional representation, it's probably going to be 7, 4, 6, 5 or something like that. And so, particularly if it's like 6'5, it's not even worth campaigning in Arizona because it's fighting for one electoral vote. You do see a little bit of this where, like the also, as you said, Nebraska and Maine are the two that currently do the district partial allocation. So they give a couple to the winner-take-all, and then the rest are they basically give the senators as winner-take all, and then the House of Representatives chunk of the allocation is by district. So in those, the districts choose it. Nebraska was debating getting rid of that and switching to a winner-take-all. Conversely, some states. So they they they talk occasionally about switching from one to the other. Usually, frankly, on pretty cynical partisan grounds. If it's a party that does well at the state legislative level, but not so well at the presidential level, well, then they often want to make it by districts. And conversely, if it's a state that's basically one party, but maybe one particular pocket is different, then they sometimes will want to switch it. But conceptually, this is one of the places where the constitution leaves the states under our federal system with a good deal of discretion. And again, part wanting to disaggregate elections, this is one of the few things about the allocation process that Hamilton does talk about in Federalist 68, which is that it's a safer system to have disaggregated elections. There's less possibility of pressure or fraud or anything like that. So, I mean, no matter how much, if you were to hack the electoral system of one state, you cannot, you're like maxed out in terms of the damage that you could do. So Hamilton does sort of acknowledge, acknowledge that point. So the Electoral College is a complicated system. We don't use its kind of elitist understanding of wanting to get this sort of filtering mechanism of elites choosing elites, choosing the most elite. But uh we do still use both it and the Senate, the recognition that the system is mixed and federalism is important. And so that's why it's not just a straight national aggregation of votes, which again is similar to the way that it's done in most of the sort of English-speaking liberal democracies.

unknown: 18:59

Dr.

SPEAKER_00: 18:59

Beyenberg, thank you for taking a very complicated subject and making it easy for us to understand. Listeners, I will link our episodes 45 and 51. And those are ones that Dr. Beyenberg had mentioned within this, but we look forward to our next episode. Thank you.