About the Vote

Rather than directly voting for the President and VP, we vote for electors. This mean we vote for whatever party's ticket we want, and that party has chosen electors who are technically free to vote for anyone eligible to be President, but actually vote for their party's candidates. Each state has a number of electors equal to the number of its Senators and Representatives in Congress. The District of Columbia also has electors as if it were a state, but never more than the number held by the "least populous" state. Currently, there are 538 electors and the majority needed to win is 270.

Presidential campaigns therefore try to win the popular vote in a combination of states to get a majority of the electors, rather than the national popular vote. Most states award all of their electoral votes to the party that wins the popular vote, but Maine and Nebraska pick a single elector within each Congressional district rather than winner-take-all, and then its remaining two electors are awared based on the statewide popular vote. If neither candidate gets at least 270, the House of Representatives chooses the president. In the same way, the Senate chooses the VP in case of neither VP getting the 270 or more. Congress has seen many proposals to switch to a direct popular-vote for the presidency, but it has never passed.

There are several US presidential election decisions that could have been reversed by a small change in the popular vote within a state. Because of the electoral college, reverses would turn a narrow-margin win into a large-margin loss, or vice-versa. Examples of this include the 1876, 1916, 1976, and 2000 presidential elections. The closest election by electoral votes was 1876, where three states saw each party claim their candidate won the popular vote and the electoral college fought amongst itself before creating a special commission, comprised of 5 Senators, 5 Representatives, and 5 Justices of the Supreme Court (8 of these were Republicans, 7 Democrats). This committee called the Republican Hayes the president, but most historians believe that the Compromise of 1877 played a big part in the decision, allowing Hayes to be elected but in return Reconstruction would be effectively over in the South. The 2000 election was officially decided by 537 popular votes in Florida, and Gore would have won a large-margin victory if he had taken Florida.

Political parties choose their slate of electors in each state, and they generally select party members with a reputation for high loyalty to the party and its candidate. There are faithless electors, though, sometimes--members of the electoral college who do not vote for the candidate they have promised to. This has happened 158 times, but many of those times were because the candidate died before the elector could vote for them. Other times it may have been by accident that an elector voted for somebody else--in 2004, an anonymous Minnesota elector voted for John Edwards to be president (instead of John Kerry), and also voted Edwards to be VP. This was most likely an accident. There have been times, however, when the elector was acting with intent--twice an elector has abstained, most recently in 2000 to protest the way Washington D.C. is not a state. All the other times, an elector or group of electors has essentially boycotted the candidate they were supposed to vote for, but never has a faithless elector changed the outcome of an election. Although some states have outlawed faithless electors, none to date have ever been charged with a crime. Faithless electors do risk ostracism or retaliation from the party they belong to.

In 1860, 4 electors in New Jersey were supposed to vote for the Northern Democrat Stephen Douglas, but instead they voted for Abraham Lincoln.