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The President of the United States isn't elected by a direct majority of the popular vote like all other offices, but by an 18th Century creation called the Electoral College. Not a school but a system of consolidating votes, the Electoral College allocates a given number of votes to each state, based on each state's number of Congressional representatives (which itself is determined by population size), that are cast by designated electors. Each state decides how they may choose their respective electors, though no elector can be an actual Federal elected official.

Each Elector gets one electoral vote to cast after Election Day, and while each elector is technically free to vote for whoever they wish, they are bound in practice by a pledge to vote in tandem with their state's popular vote as counted on Election Day in November. Rarely do electors deviate from their state's popular vote in casting their electoral ballot.

The candidate that earns a majority of the vote in a state typically gets every single one of that state's electoral votes. For example, if Barack Obama gets 55% of the popular vote in the state of Washington (which has 11 representatives in Congress and, thus, 11 electoral votes), Obama earns Washington's 11 electoral votes. This goes for every state and all of their respective electoral votes. The Electoral College is, in effect, 50 separate presidential elections, whose results are weighted by each state's number of Congressional representatives before being accumulated into a national total.

The Electoral College was originally proposed and, despite understandable misgivings, approved in 1787 to facilitate selection of the first U.S. President in 1788. Travel and communication wasn't as easy as it is today. Leaders of the new United States felt it more efficient to appoint a small, proportional, educated sample of representatives from each state to cast votes for President on their state's behalf than to manually count and verify ballots for every voter in the nation, many of which had no clue about national politics, let alone what each candidate stood for. The system has been retained since, though it has been politically modified over time so that statewide voting now dictates how electors will vote.

This year, there are 538 electoral votes. To win the Presidency, a candidate must accumulate 270 of those electoral votes in any combination. Due to the funneling that comes when as little as a 51-49 majority can dictate the allocation of an entire set of electoral votes, it is possible for the Presidential candidate that gets the most votes nationwide to lose the Presidential election if the other candidate wins more electoral votes. Such a fate occurred in 1876, 1888 and most recently in 2000.

Some argue that, 220 years later, this process is no longer necessary. Efficient transport and advanced technology allow us to count ballots faster than ever, and quickly relay all voting results to a central location, which allows a quick, single, cumulative count of all votes nationwide. TV, newspapers, the internet and radio allow every citizen to get informed on national news, let alone the Presidential candidates. Many have advocated that the Electoral College be scrapped and that we select the President with a popular vote just as we do with other offices.

Until that happens, the United States shall choose their President in 2008 with the same Electoral College system that elected George Washington back in 1788, and every U.S. President since.

Learn more about this author, Steven Gomez.
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