When the American people choose a President, they do not cast their votes into a single national reckoning to be summed from coast to coast. They vote instead within their several states, and it is the states, through a body of electors, that formally elect the President. This arrangement is older than any living institution of public life, and though it is much discussed it is not always well understood. Set down plainly, its workings lie within the grasp of any attentive reader.
The design rests upon a simple allotment. Each state is granted a number of electors equal to the whole of its representation in the national legislature: its seats in the House of Representatives, which vary with its population, together with its two senators, which every state possesses alike. Thus even the least populous state commands at least three electors, while the most populous command many. The seat of the national government is also accorded a number of electors, though it is not a state. The sum of all these electors forms the College that chooses the President.
How the Electors Are Awarded
Within each state the manner of awarding electors is settled by the state itself, and here custom has grown remarkably uniform. In nearly every state the candidate who wins the most votes across the whole state receives all of that state's electors, however narrow or wide the margin of victory. This is the practice commonly called winner-take-all, and it is the rule in the great majority of the states.
Two states have chosen otherwise. Maine and Nebraska divide their electors, awarding some by the vote within each congressional district and the remaining pair by the vote of the state as a whole. The result is that these two may split their electors between candidates, a thing the winner-take-all states do not do. The difference is one of state law, not of national command, and it illustrates that the several states retain a real liberty in how they cast their portion of the choice.
The Majority, and What Follows Its Absence
To be elected President, a candidate must win not merely more electoral votes than any rival but a majority of the whole number of electors appointed. It is not enough to lead the field; one must command more than half. This requirement of a majority is the hinge upon which the whole system turns, and it carries a consequence that many citizens never have occasion to see exercised.
Should no candidate gather a majority of the electors, the choice does not fail but passes to the House of Representatives. In that event the House elects the President from among the leading candidates, and it does so by a method the Constitution prescribes: the representatives vote not as individuals but by states, each state delegation casting a single vote, and a majority of the states is required to elect. This is termed the contingent election. It is a rare recourse, provided for at the founding and seldom needed, yet it is a settled part of the constitutional design and stands ready whenever the ordinary count yields no majority.
From these rules follows a pattern the reader will have marked in every season of national canvassing. Because a state awards its electors as a bloc, and because so many states lean reliably toward one side or the other, the contest is truly decided in the smaller number of states whose outcome is genuinely in doubt. To these uncertain states the campaigns direct their greatest labor and attention, while states thought settled receive comparatively little. It is the arithmetic of the College, and not the mere preference of the candidates, that draws the contest onto that uncertain ground.
Yet the whole of this machinery begins with an ordinary act. The electors a state appoints are determined by the votes of its people, and so the citizen who marks a ballot is the first link in the chain that ends in the choosing of a President. The electors, the majority, the contingent election should it come to that: all of it proceeds from the tally taken in the precincts. To understand the College is not to stand apart from it but to see one's own vote for what it is, the first and founding motion of the entire design.