Electoral College

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A mechanism for the indirect election of public officials. For the purpose of electing the President and Vice President of the United States a 538-member Electoral College is created with each state having as many electors as it has representatives and senators in the national legislature, plus 3 for the District of Columbia. To be elected, a candidate must obtain an absolute majority in the Electoral College, currently 270. If no candidate gains an absolute majority the US House of Representatives makes the choice, with the delegation from each state having one vote.

Most of these arrangements were devised in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 as a compromise between those who proposed a direct popular election of the President and those who preferred to make him subject to election by the legislature. As originally conceived, members of the Electoral College were expected to be prominent state worthies impervious to transient public moods. However, such notions were quickly overtaken by the emergence of parties and the popular election of electors in place of their appointment by state legislatures. The ‘winner takes all’ rule, or convention, that all of a state's Electoral College votes go to the candidate which wins the highest popular vote, is not in the US Constitution; two states (Maine and Nebraska) assign their electoral votes in proportion to the state vote for each candidate. Occasionally, states elect unpledged electors, or electors break their pledge and vote for a candidate other than the one they said they would. Because of the constitutional origins of the college, electors cannot be punished for this.

Reformers regularly query the merits of the Electoral College system for ‘misfired’ elections (where a loser gains more popular votes than the winner) and for the contingency arrangements that come into play when no candidate wins a majority in the Electoral College. The elections of 1824, 1876, 1888, and 2000 misfired and misfires came perilously close in 1844, 1880, 1884, 1960, and 1968. Of these, 1876 and 2000 sparked legitimacy crises. That of 1876 was resolved by a ‘corrupt bargain’ whereby the Republicans kept the Presidency and the Democrats were allowed back into power in the South, where they resumed their oppression of African-Americans. That of 2000 was suddenly ended by the terrorist attacks of September 2001, which conferred legitimacy on President George Bush that his election by one vote in the Supreme Court had failed to do. If all states followed Maine and Nebraska and allocated electoral college votes in proportion to the popular vote in the state, misfires like 2000 would be less likely and misdemeanours in counting (such as those in Florida in 2000) less momentous.

When an election is thrown into the House the bargaining required to form a majority could also create a crisis of legitimacy. This occurred 1800 and 1824 and might have happened in 1960, 1968, 1980, 1992, and 2000. There could also be a dangerous period of uncertainty in that the House would not make its decision until early January, a mere two weeks before the inauguration.

— David Mervin/Iain McLean

The electoral college is the formal body, created by the Constitution (Article 2, Section 1), that elects the President of the United States. Each state has as many electors in the electoral college as it has senators and representatives in Congress. When citizens participate in a Presidential election, they are actually voting for electors pledged to vote for their candidate.

The method of choosing electors is determined by state election laws. At first many states left the decision to their legislatures; other states permitted the people to choose the electors. By 1832 all states except South Carolina had switched to popular election of Presidential electors, and that state joined the others in 1856.

There is no constitutional requirement that all the electors of a state vote for a single candidate, but all states except Michigan in the 1890s and Maine in modern times have provided for a winner-take-all system: the candidate who receives a majority of the popular vote in the state receives all the state's electoral votes, and the other candidates receive nothing. Maine has adopted a “congressional district” system that chooses electors based on the plurality (the most votes but not necessarily a majority) in each district. This means that a candidate might win 3 rather than all 4 electoral votes if he or she loses in one of the districts. (The winner of the statewide vote in Maine also receives the two “senatorial” electors.)

On a date fixed by Congress the people vote in each state (and the District of Columbia) for members of the electoral college. Although the names of the Presidential candidates appear on the ballot, the voters actually cast their ballots for a slate of electors pledged to vote for that candidate. After the popular voting, on a date fixed by Congress (currently, the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December), the winning electors meet in their respective state capitals to cast one ballot for President and one ballot for Vice President. (The electoral college never meets in a single place to cast ballots because the framers of the Constitution feared that the electors could be coerced or bribed more easily in one location.) The ballots from each state are sent to Congress. The outgoing Vice President of the United States (who is the president of the Senate) counts the ballots in the presence of Congress and announces the name of the next President. In 1960 Richard Nixon, as president of the Senate, announced that he had lost the election to John F. Kennedy. In 1968, outgoing Vice President Hubert Humphrey announced that Nixon had defeated him for the Presidency.

The delegates to the Constitutional Convention thought that in most elections the electoral college would be dominated by electors from the large states, who would vote for candidates from their own states. In that situation, none of the five leading candidates would amass the necessary majority of votes to be elected. In the event of a deadlock, the election would go to the House of Representatives, where each state's delegation would cast a single vote for one of the top five contenders. In a sense, the electoral college was expected to function as a nominating body and the House as the final arbiter. (The 12th Amendment to the Constitution, adopted in 1804, restricts the House's choice to the top three candidates.) The Vice President would be chosen by the Senate from among the top two candidates in the event of an electoral college deadlock.

The cumbersome system of contingency elections provided by the Constitution would give the large states the chance to “nominate” candidates for President, while all states, large and small, would have an equal voice in the final selection. This compromise between large and small states is at the heart of the original electoral college scheme.

The framers thought that electors would operate as free agents, diligently searching to find the best candidates for President. But since 1796 electors have been the agents of political parties supporting candidates already seeking the office. The electoral college has become a registering device for the preferences of the voters. Only a few electors have ever violated their pledges and voted for someone else, and none of these “faithless electors” have ever influenced the outcome of an election by doing so.

There have been two elections in which the electoral college deadlocked and contingency elections were held. In 1800 Thomas Jefferson was the Presidential candidate and Aaron Burr the Vice Presidential candidate of the Republicans. At that time each elector cast two ballots for President; the top candidate was elected President and the runner-up assumed the Vice Presidency. Jefferson and Burr each received the same number of electoral college votes for President, and because neither received a majority, the election went to the House, which elected Jefferson. To forestall that possibility in future elections, the 12th Amendment, adopted for the election of 1804, provided that the electoral college cast separate ballots cast for President and Vice President.

In 1824, when no candidate received a majority of electors, the House chose John Quincy Adams for President, even though Andrew Jackson had received a higher popular vote. In 1836, Virginia electors refused to vote for Richard M. Johnson for Vice President, denying any candidate a majority. The Senate then voted to make Johnson Vice President.

In 1876, when Southern Democrats were contending with radical Republicans for control of their state governments, close contests in several Southern states led both parties to claim victory, and therefore Democratic and Republican electors sent their ballots to the Capitol. It took a special commission set up by Congress to decide which party had won the statewide vote and therefore which party's ballots should be counted. In what was effectively a deal to end military occupation of the South, the Southern Democrats accepted the commission's finding that the electoral votes of the Republicans would be counted, thus ensuring the election of Republican President Rutherford B. Hayes, who needed all the contested votes cast in his favor to defeat his Democratic opponent, Samuel Tilden, by a single electoral vote. In turn, federal troops were quickly withdrawn from Southern states and Reconstruction policies were ended.

In several elections the candidate with the most popular votes has been defeated: Andrew Jackson in 1824; Samuel Tilden in 1876; and Graver Cleveland in 1888.

In other situations, small shifts in the popular vote could have had major effects on the electoral vote. In 1976, if a total of 9,245 votes had shifted to Gerald Ford in Ohio and Hawaii, he would have been elected President, even though he would have received 1.7 million fewer votes than Jimmy Carter. In 1988, a shift of 547,000 votes in 11 states would have shifted the election from George Bush to Michael Dukakis, even though Bush would have retained a margin of 5 million votes.

In the election of 2000, Vice President Albert Gore won the popular vote but narrowly lost the electoral college to Texas Governor George W. Bush. Gore objected to the vote count in Florida, where Bush was certified as winning by 500 votes, but where 175,000 ballots were eliminated by voting machines that could not determine for whom the ballots had been cast. These “undercounted” ballots came disproportionately from districts that favored Gore. He demanded a hand recount of the disputed ballots to determine the intention of the voters, but Bush sued to stop the recount. By a vote of 5–4, in Bush v. Gore, the U.S. Supreme Court, prohibited a recount because not enough time remained to ensure the equal protection of all voters. Florida's electors, and with them the presidency, then went to Bush.

In the 1970s several constitutional amendments to abolish the electoral college were introduced in Congress, and on several occasions they have passed the House or Senate, but none has received the two-thirds vote necessary for adoption. .

See also Adams, John Quincy; Burr, Aaron; Hayes, Rutherford B.; Humphrey, Hubert H.; Jackson, Andrew; Jefferson, Thomas; Johnson, Andrew; Kennedy, John F.; Nixon, Richard M.

Sources

• Lawrence D. Longley and Alan G. Braun, The Politics of Electoral College Reform (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975).
• Neal R. Peirce and Lawrence D. Longley, The People's President, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981).
• Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Fred L. Israel, eds., Running for President (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993)

Created by the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the electoral college selects individuals for the U.S. presidency and vice presidency. It has been modified both by extra-constitutional developments, like the growth of political parties, and by constitutional amendments.

Origins and Procedures

Delegates to the U.S. Constitutional Convention divided the national government into legislative, executive, and judicial branches. This arrangement seemed incompatible with a system, like that in most parliamentary democracies, in which the majority party or coalition within the legislature selects the chief executive. Convention delegates were especially fearful that the legislature might exert undue influence on individuals who were seeking reelection. Some delegates favored electing the president by direct popular vote, but this was not particularly feasible at a time before computer technology, and delegates feared that many members of the public would not be familiar with candidates from states other than their own.

At the Constitutional Convention proponents of the Virginia Plan argued for a bicameral legislature, in which state representatives in both houses would be elected on the basis of population. Proponents of the New Jersey Plan favored maintaining the system of representation under the Articles of Confederation, in which states were represented equally. Delegates eventually resolved this issue with the Connecticut Compromise (also called the Great Compromise), which apportioned state representation according to population in the House of Representatives but then granted each state two votes in the Senate. This compromise also influenced the construction of the electoral college.

Outlined in Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution, this plan granted each state a number of electoral votes equal to its combined representation in the House and Senate. Each state would choose this number of electors, who would meet in their respective state capitals (a meeting that now occurs in December), cast two votes (at least one of which had to be for an out-of-state candidate), send the votes to the U.S. Congress, and disband. When the votes were opened in Congress (which now occurs in January), the individual receiving the majority of votes would become president and the runner-up would become vice president. If no individual received a majority—a situation many delegates at the Constitutional Convention thought would be the norm—the House of Representatives would choose the president and vice president from among the top five candidates, with each state delegation receiving a single vote. If the House tied on its choice for vice president, senators would make this selection.

This system worked relatively well in the first election of 1789, when, in an event never again repeated, George Washington was unanimously selected as president and John Adams was selected, over some competition, for vice president. However, the system did not work very well as political parties developed and candidates began running as a team. Thus, in the election of 1796, delegates chose Federalist John Adams as president and Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson as vice president. The results of the election of 1800 were even murkier. Although Jefferson beat Adams in the election for president, he tied in the electoral college with his party's putative vice president, Aaron Burr. Lame-duck Federalists had the chance to decide the election. It took thirty-six ballots before some Federalists abstained from voting and thus chose Jefferson as president over Burr, but the election had clearly pointed to a problem.

The Twelfth Amendment and After

To remedy this problem, the Twelfth Amendment (1804) mandated that electors cast separate votes for president and vice president, thus allowing those who voted for a party ticket to do so without worrying about a tie. If no one received a majority of the votes for president, the House, again voting by states, would choose from among the top three candidates. If no one received a majority of votes for the vice presidency, the Senate would choose from among the top two candidates. This has happened only once in U.S. history, when in 1837 the Senate chose Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky.

The revised electoral system did not avert controversy in the presidential election of 1824, which featured four main candidates, none of whom received a majority of electoral votes. Andrew Jackson, the well-liked hero of the War of 1812, received the largest number of popular votes. John Quincy Adams, son of the former president, received the next largest number of votes; Georgia's ailing William Crawford came in third; and Kentucky's Henry Clay was fourth. Clay threw his support in the House to Adams, who won the election and later appointed Clay as secretary of state. Jackson charged that a "corrupt bargain" had been struck and beat Adams in the next presidential election.

The Constitution left states free to select presidential electors as they chose, but over time all decided to choose such electors through popular elections. Voters further came to expect that electors would vote for the candidates to whom they were pledged rather than exercising their own individual judgments. Eventually, all states except for Maine and Nebraska adopted a "winner-take-all" system, whereby the individuals who won a majority of votes within a state received all of the state's electoral votes. This generally magnifies the winning margin, giving successful candidates a higher percentage of the electoral vote than of the popular vote. Such a system also advantages the third-party candidacies of individuals with strong regional appeal, like Strom Thurmond (1948) and George Wallace (1968), over those with broader but more widely diffused support, like Millard Fillmore (1856) and Ross Perot (1992).

On occasion, however, the two votes come into conflict. Republican Rutherford B. Hayes beat Democrat Samuel Tilden in the election of 1876 despite receiving fewer popular votes. Ballots were disputed in three key southern states. An electoral commission created by Congress and composed in part of Supreme Court justices, who, like others on the commission, voted a straight party line, gave all the disputed ballots to Hayes.

Similarly, in the election of 1888 Republican Benjamin Harrison won the electoral votes even though Democratic President Grover Cleveland outpolled him in popular votes. Despite other extremely close elections, in which delegations from one or two states sometimes held the balance, such an event was not repeated until the historic election of 2000. Republican George W. Bush eked out a narrow win in the electoral college over Democrat Albert Gore by claiming a similarly narrow win in the state of Florida, after the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Bush v. Gore (2000) that continuing recounts of votes in that state violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Other Amendments

Several constitutional amendments, most notably the Fifteenth (1870), the Nineteenth (1920), and the Twenty-sixth (1971), have increased the number of citizens eligible to vote in presidential elections. By altering the date that new members of Congress are inaugurated, the Twentieth Amendment (1933) ensured that any decisions made by Congress in cases where no candidate receives a majority would be made by newly elected rather than lame-duck members; by moving the presidential inauguration forward, it also gave Congress far less time to resolve disputed elections. The Twenty-third Amendment (1961) further provided that representatives of the District of Columbia, who were previously unrepresented in the electoral college, would have votes equal to that of the smallest states (currently three), raising the total electoral votes to 538, of which 270 constitute a majority. Moreover, the Twenty-fifth Amendment (1967) provided for vice-presidential vacancies by establishing a mechanism whereby a majority vote of both houses of Congress would approve a candidate nominated by the president for such vacancies. To date, the mechanism has been used to appoint two vice presidents, Gerald Ford and Nelson Rockefeller, with Ford becoming the first unelected president in U.S. history when President Richard M. Nixon resigned from office in 1974.

Pros and Cons

Supporters generally praise the electoral college for bolstering the two major political parties. By giving them incentives to "carry" their state, the system forces candidates to pay special attention to populous states with strong two-party competition. Advocates of federalism favor the electoral college system, and some argue that it is easier to resolve close elections on a state-by-state basis than on a national one. Other supporters of the electoral college praise the mechanism for generally magnifying popular margins of support, giving winning candidates clearer mandates.

Critics of the electoral college generally focus on the complexity of what they label an antiquated system that sometimes awards the presidency and vice presidency to individuals who did not win the popular vote. Critics are not as united in their solutions, however. The most obvious and popular solution is direct popular election, with a runoff election if no candidate gets 40 percent or more of the vote. The U.S. House of Representatives proposed such an amendment by a vote of 338 to 70 in 1969, but in part because of concerns over the runoff election, the Senate twice killed it.

Other critics of the electoral college have focused on eliminating the occasional "faithless electors," who vote for individuals other than the ones to whom they are pledged by their state's popular vote. Still others have proposed awarding votes by individual congressional districts (with a state's two additional votes going to the winner of the state) or allocating such votes by percentages. Although presumably they would make the possibility less likely, both such systems could still result in an electoral college winner who did not capture a majority of the popular vote.

Bibliography

Berns, Walter, ed. After the People Vote: A Guide to the Electoral College. Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 1992.

Best, Judith A. The Choice of the People? Debating the Electoral College. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1996.

Dionne, E. J., and William Kristol, eds. Bush v. Gore: The Court Cases and Commentary. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2001.

Kuroda, Tadahisa. The Origins of the Twelfth Amendment: The Electoral College in the Early Republic, 1787-1804. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994.

Longley, Lawrence D., and Neal R. Peirce. The Electoral College Primer 2000. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999.

Nelson, Michael, ed. Guide to the Presidency. 3d ed., 2 vols. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, Inc., 2002.

Vile, John R. A Companion to the United States Constitution and Its Amendments. 3d ed. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2001.

—John R. Vile

When Americans vote for a president and vice president, they are actually voting for presidential electors, known collectively as the electoral college. It is these electors, chosen by the people, who elect the chief executive. The Constitution assigns each state a number of electors equal to the combined total of the state's Senate (always two) and House of Representatives delegation (which may change each decade according to the size of each state's population as determined in the U.S. Census); at the time of the 2004 presidential election, the number of electors per state ranged from 3 to 55, for a total of 538.

In each presidential election year, a group (called a ticket or slate) of candidates for elector is nominated by political parties and other groupings in each state, usually at a state party convention, or by the party state committee. In most states, voters cast a single vote for the slate of electors pledged to the party presidential and vice presidential candidates of their choice. The slate winning the most popular votes is elected; this is known as the winner-take-all, or general ticket, system. Maine and Nebraska use the district system, under which two electors are chosen on a statewide, at-large basis, and one is elected in each congressional district. Electors assemble in their respective states on the Monday after the second Wednesday in December. They are pledged and expected, but not required, to vote for the candidates they represent. Separate ballots are cast for president and vice president, after which the electoral college ceases to exist for another four years.

Nominated persons, known as electors, from the states and the District of Columbia, who meet every four years in their home state or district and cast ballots to choose the president and vice president of the United States.

In the popular election, the American people actually vote for electors, not the candidates themselves. The candidate receiving the majority of votes from electors takes office. Although the Constitution allows the electors to vote for any candidate, they usually vote for the candidate of the political party that nominated them. In a limited number of instances, the structure of the electoral college has led to unusual election results.

The republican basis of the electoral college stems from the Constitution. When the founders of the United States set out to secure a system of political representation, many among them feared mob rule. Elections based on representative blocks of votes would implement checks within the system. The founders took into consideration that large numbers of regional candidates could appeal to the interests of various select groups, and thus the populace could be divided widely, and disturbances in the succession of power could ensue. The founders surmised that Congress should have the power to settle issues not resolved in a popular election, and created the electoral college. As a contributor to this system, Alexander Hamilton said that it made sure "the office of President will seldom fall to the lot of any man who is not in eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications." Rogue politicians, riding any waves of popular sentiments, would need to meet a higher approval before their election. The electoral college thus ensured an orderly transfer of power, especially in the two-party system that the United States developed.

Electors receive their appointments from a wide and various informal circuit of possible electoral candidates during election times and are nominated in many states according to the guideline of individual state legislatures. The procedures for nominating electors, whether at party conventions, primary elections, or party organizational meetings, differ throughout the United States. The terms of electors are generally not set by statute, and in some states parties adopt their own criteria for selecting the college's members. However, the Constitution provides that "no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector" (U.S. Const. art. II, § 1, cl. 2).

In most states, only the names of the presidential and vice presidential candidates — not the names of the electors — appear on election ballots. The party that gains the most popular votes in a state receives one electoral vote for each of its electors. In each state, each party nominates the same number of electors as there are representatives and senators for that state in Congress.

On the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December following the popular election, the electors from each state's victorious party cast their ballots. The structure of the electoral college was established in Article II, Section 1, of the U.S. Constitution. Under the original provision, each elector of the college cast two votes for president, and the candidate receiving the second-highest number of votes assumed the vice presidency. In 1804, the Twelfth Amendment modified the original plan to separate the votes cast for the president and the vice president. The electors may choose to vote for another candidate — as West Virginia's electors did in the 1916 race between Charles Evans Hughes andWoodrow Wilson. However, this occurs only rarely, and even less often does it sway the results of an election. As the electoral system is designed, generally, all the electoral votes from each state go to the winner of the state's popular vote. Only Maine does not use the winner-take-all system. Maine uses the district plan (discussed later in this article).

The electors then sign, seal, and certify lists of their ballots. These lists go to Washington, D.C., where the president of the Senate, in the presence of the Senate and the House of Representatives, opens them. The votes are counted. If the electors fail to cast a majority vote, the House of Representatives chooses the U.S. president and vice president by ballot. In 1824 John Quincy Adams was chosen president by the House. Although the recipient of the majority of the electoral votes is determined by the college, Congress retains the power of verifying the results and makes official the election of president and vice president.

The workings of the electoral college have not gone unchallenged. The controversial presidential election of 1876 pitted Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, a former governor of Ohio, against Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, a former governor of New York. Reacting against the Reconstruction measures of Republicans in the South, Tilden received strong support from Southern Democrats. When the election returns came in on November 7, 1876, Tilden had clearly received the majority of the popular votes. However, Republicans determined that if they challenged the outcome of the voting in key areas of Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, Hayes could win. The Republicans sought victory at all costs and went all out to claim the electoral votes from those states as their own.

The Republicans waged a publicity campaign through the national press, suppressing the tallies of the popular vote. Republican election committees dubiously managed to demonstrate that several key counties contained discrepancies in population figures, voter registration, and ballots cast. Democrats, for obvious reasons, contested the Republicans' tactics. The parties agreed to let an electoral commission, appointed by Congress, determine the winner of the disputed electoral votes. The commission consisted of fifteen members from the Supreme Court, the House, and the Senate. In the end, a Republican justice, Joseph P. Bradley, swayed the outcome of the commission's findings. With less than forty-eight hours before Tilden's scheduled inauguration, the commission announced that Hayes had won the necessary electoral votes. On March 3, 1877, Hayes was inaugurated.

The results of the election posed issues for both proponents and critics. Defenders of the electoral system claimed that the problems surrounding the 1876 election had less to do with the college than with political corruption. They maintained that the election could have resulted in a greater debacle if the constitutional structure of the college had not finally settled the contested issues. Critics countered that direct elections would fit the wishes of the people better than did what looked like oligarchic manipulations of the college.

In following years, critics added more ammunition to their attack with the election race between Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland in 1888. With an unusual demographic breakdown of ballots, Harrison became president with the majority of electoral votes but with fewer popular votes than Cleveland. Throughout the next century, many wondered how such confused elections could take place.

Proposed alternatives to the current electoral college system generally fall into three categories. In the first, the candidate with the most popular votes in a state would automatically receive those electoral votes. This system would eliminate independent voting among electors. In the second proposed alternative, a proportionality scheme, the breakdown of popular votes would correlate directly with the breakdown of electoral votes. This plan would abandon the winner-take-all structure of the college. In the third alternative, the district plan used in Maine, individual congressional districts would be treated as representative of a single electoral vote, and the two electoral votes that each state receives for its two senators would go to the winner of the majority of the districts. To some advocates, there also exists a fourth option: abolishing the electoral college altogether and letting a direct vote of the people determine who wins the offices of president and vice president.

Despite two controversial elections and occasional calls for change, the electoral system has more or less secured an extended series of peaceable transfers of power in the United States. Absent drastic changes in the political landscape, its role in selecting the U.S. president and vice president seems secure.

The presidential electors who meet after the citizens vote for president and cast ballots for the president and vice president. Each state is granted the same number of electors as it has senators (see United States Senate) and representatives combined. These electors, rather than the public, actually elect the president and the vice president. The Founding Fathers assumed that electors would exercise discretion and not necessarily be bound by the popular vote, but the rise of political parties undermined this assumption. Electors are now pledged in advance to vote for the candidate of their party, and nearly always do so. Thus, the vote of the Electoral College is largely a formality.

This article is about electoral colleges in general. For the U.S. system of electing the president, see Electoral College (United States). For other uses, see Electoral college (disambiguation).

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An electoral college is a set of electors who are selected to elect a candidate to a particular office. Often these represent different organizations or entities, with each organization or entity represented by a particular number of electors or with votes weighted in a particular way. Many times, though, the electors are simply important people whose wisdom, ideally, would provide a better choice than a larger body. The system can ignore the wishes of a general membership, whose thinking need not be considered.

Contents 1 Origins of electoral colleges 2 Modern electoral colleges 3 References 4 External links

Origins of electoral colleges

Germanic law stated that the German king led only with the support of his nobles. Thus, Pelayo needed to be elected by his Visigothic nobles before becoming king of Asturias, and so did Pepin the Short by Frankish nobles in order to become the first Carolingian king. While most other Germanic nations had developed a strictly hereditary system by the end of the first millennium, the Holy Roman Empire could not, and the King of the Romans, who would become Holy Roman Emperor or at least Emperor-elect, was selected by the college of prince-electors from the late Middle Ages until 1806 (the last election actually took place in 1792).

Christianity also used electoral colleges in ancient times, until late antiquity (AD 300-600). Initially, the entire membership of a particular church, both the clergy and laity, elected the bishop or chief presbyter. However, for various reasons such as a desire to reduce the influence of the state or the laity in church matters, electoral power became restricted to the clergy and, in the case of the Western Church, exclusively to a college of the canons of the cathedral church. In the Pope's case, the system of people and clergy was eventually replaced by a college of the important clergy of Rome, which eventually evolved into the College of Cardinals. Since 1059, it has had exclusive authority over papal selection.

Modern electoral colleges

The breakdown of votes in the U.S. Electoral College after redistricting based on the 2000 census.

Some nations with complex regional electorates elect a head of state by means of an electoral college rather than a direct popular election. The United States is the only current example of an indirectly elected executive president, with an electoral college comprising electors representing the 50 states and one federal district. Each state has a number of electors equal to its total Congressional representation (in both houses), with the non-state District of Columbia receiving three electors and other non-state territories having no electors. The electors generally cast their votes for the winner of the popular vote in their respective states, but in some states are not required by law to do so.

Similar systems are used or have been used in other presidential elections around the world. For example, the short-lived Confederate States of America (1861-1865) provided for election of its president in virtually the same manner as set out in the U.S. Constitution^{[citation needed]}. The President of Finland was elected by an electoral college between 1919 and 1987. In Germany and India, the members of the lower house of Parliament together with an equal number of members (Germany) or weighted votes (India) from the state parliaments elect the non-executive President of the Republic, while in Italy the presidential electoral college is composed of the members of both houses of Parliament and three members elected by each of the regional assemblies.

Another type of Electoral College is used by the British Labour Party to choose its leader. The college consists of three equally weighted sections: the votes of Labour MPs and MEPs; the votes of affiliated trade unions and socialist societies; and the votes of individual members of Constituency Labour Parties.^[1]

During Brazil's military rule period, the president was elected by an electoral college comprising senators, deputies, state deputies, and lawmakers in the cities. Argentina had an electoral college established by its original 1853 constitution, which was used to elect its president during that country's periods of democracy. The constitution was reformed in 1994 and the electoral college was replaced with a direct election by popular vote with runoff round.^{[citation needed]}

Other countries with electoral college systems include Burundi, Estonia,^[2] India,^[3] France, Ireland (for the French Senate and Seanad Éireann, respectively), Kazakhstan, Madagascar, Pakistan, and Trinidad and Tobago^[4]. Hong Kong also has such a system.

Ecclesiastical electoral colleges abound in modern times, especially among Protestant and Eastern Rite Catholic Churches. In the Eastern rite churches, all the bishops of an autocephalous church elect successor bishops, thus serving as an electoral college for all the episcopal sees.

References

1. ^ Labour Party Rule Book rule 4B.2c - quoted in House of Commons Research Note SN/PC/3938: Labour Party Leadership Elections retrieved 6 February 2008
2. ^ Constitution of Estonia, section 79 - retrieved on 4 April 2008
3. ^ Constitution of India, articles 54 and 66 - retrieved on 4 April 2008
4. ^ Constitution of Trinidad and Tobago, section 28 - retrieved on 4 April 2008

External links

• A Handbook of Electoral System Design from International IDEA
• A New Nation Votes: American Election Returns 1787-1825

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