States have their own rules for choosing electors. Roughly in line with the size of its population, each state gets as many electors as it has lawmakers in the US Congress representatives in the House and Senate. Once we know who won a state's popular vote, we know which party will appoint the electors for that state.
Electors are like rubber stamps that formalise how their state voted, so they are usually loyal supporters of their party. Electors have already pledged their support for a certain candidate, so they almost always vote as pledged. This changed in , when a historic number of so-called "faithless electors" - seven in total - voted for candidates other than those they had pledged to support five turned against Clinton, two against Trump.
It was the first election since to feature more than one faithless elector. States have since looked to strengthen their rules against faithless electors, pushing laws to remove them and have their votes retracted if they do not vote as pledged, a move backed by the US Supreme Court. With the backing of several high-profile supporters, President Trump has called on Republican state legislatures in states he lost to throw out their popular vote results and appoint their own set of electors.
Election law experts are sceptical that this is possible and Republican state leaders have pushed back against this suggestion. A successful presidential candidate must get at least out of the votes that make up the electoral college. If electors vote based on the certified results of their states, they will give Joe Biden votes and Donald Trump , thus officially handing the presidency to Mr Biden. By far the most famous elector this year is Hillary Clinton.
The former secretary of state and first lady lost the presidential election to Mr Trump, but she gets the last laugh as an elector this year from her adopted home state of New York. In announcing that she was an elector, Mrs Clinton said it would be "pretty exciting" to cast her vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as the next president and vice-president, respectively.
Mrs Clinton has previously called for the abolition of the Electoral College, arguing presidents should instead be selected by popular vote. Second, the Founders sought to supply a basis of popular legitimacy for the president.
The Electoral College, under which the Electors would be chosen either by the people or the state legislatures, was under the circumstances of the day a quite popular process. The system, it was thought, would ordinarily hear the public voice. Third, even with this popular input, the Electors were still representatives having the discretion to choose among the most fit of the candidates.
The Founders were especially concerned about the dangers involved in the selection of the president, and they counted on the Electors to block the election of a demagogue. No threat was graver than this to the survival of the constitutional system. Finally, the Electoral College system was meant to channel the energies of the major political figures who had thoughts of achieving the highest office.
The Eligibility Clause establishing the criteria of eligibility for the presidency reflected two concerns. The first is to avoid the possibility of divided loyalty on the part of the president. As the president is the most important single official of the government and the one with the major responsibility for conducting affairs with foreign nations, a perfect fidelity to the nation, and to no other country, becomes an essential objective.
Even the public suspicion of divided loyalty can sap confidence in the presidency. The Founders accordingly required that, in the future, the president must be a natural-born citizen—that is, not an immigrant—and a resident in the United States for fourteen years before being elected—that is, someone who has not moved to live abroad. Many have questioned this one difference that is created between the status of born and naturalized citizens.
The second criterion of eligibility is the age requirement of 35 years, five years greater than that of a senator and 10 years of a member of the House.
The higher age for the presidency was meant to increase the likelihood that the president would have acquired experience relevant to governing and, returning to the question of presidential selection, that the public and Electors would have a record for judging the candidates.
In fact, the minimum age seems to have undershot considerably what the American public has preferred. The youngest person to become president was Theodore Roosevelt, who ascended at age 42 to the presidency from the vice-presidency following the death of William McKinley.
John Kennedy was the youngest elected to be president at These two requirements for eligibility are the only ones in the original Constitution and naturally lead one to think of the many possibilities that do not apply: ethnicity, race, gender, religious affiliation explicitly excluded in Article VI, Clause 3 , and property qualifications.
This Clause is also the one that resolved—silently—the question of the number of terms a president can serve. The Founders placed no limits on the length of service.
This was changed by the Twenty-Second Amendment , ratified in , which bars eligibility to a person elected to two terms or one term and service as president for more than two years of the term of another person.
The Compensation Cause likewise has two objectives. First, while the Constitution does not set a salary, it does say that the president shall be paid, obviating a proposal at the Convention that the president might serve without compensation, which would have restricted the presidency to persons of wealth or favorites of the wealthy.
Second, once the Congress sets the compensation, it can neither be increased nor reduced during the time the president serves. Section 1 of Article II concludes with the oath of office.
Oaths are mentioned for other officers elsewhere in the Constitution see Article VI , but only in the case of the presidency is the text of the oath spelled out. So the oath was understood by President Lincoln. On the first count, Lincoln explained that notwithstanding his personal views of slavery, he felt bound by the oath to restrict his actions on this great matter only to what was permitted under the Constitution.
I had publicly declared this many times, and in many ways. And I aver that, to this day, I have done no official act in mere deference to my abstract judgment and feeling on slavery.
I did understand however, that my oath to preserve the constitution to the best of my ability, imposed upon me the duty of preserving, by every indispensable means, that government — that nation — of which that constitution was the organic law.
Was it possible to lose the nation, and yet preserve the constitution? By general law life and limb must be protected; yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to save a limb. I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful, by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the constitution, through the preservation of the nation. These four sentences raise the great question of the adequacy of following the letter of the law to achieving, under extreme circumstances, the good of the nation.
Lincoln claimed to discover within the text of the Constitution, specifically in the oath, the answer to this most agonizing of dilemmas. Abraham Lincoln, Letter to Albert G. Hodges Apr. The Compact is activated when states representing Electoral College votes agree to join.
There are currently Electoral votes represented in the Compact, more than half needed. Constitution does not specify procedures for the nomination of candidates for presidential elector. The two most common methods the states have adopted are nomination by state party convention and by state party committee.
Generally, the parties select members known for their loyalty and service to the party, such as party leaders, state and local elected officials and party activists. However, in most states, electors' names are not printed on the ballot.
All 50 states and the District of Columbia use one of two methods for awarding their electoral votes:. In 48 states and the District of Columbia, when a candidate for president wins a state's popular vote, that party's slate of electors will be the ones to cast the vote for president of the United States in December. For example, Florida has 29 electoral votes. These 29 people will gather on Dec.
Maine and Nebraska are the only states that do not use a winner-take-all system. Instead, in these two states, one electoral vote is awarded to the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote in each congressional district, and the remaining two electoral votes are awarded to the candidates receiving the most votes statewide. This is known as the district system. It is possible under the district system to split the electoral vote for the state. This happened in in Nebraska: Barack Obama won the electoral vote in the congressional district including Omaha, while John McCain won in the state's other two districts and won the statewide vote as well, securing the state's two at-large votes.
Thus, when the Nebraska presidential electors met in December , there were four Republican electors and one Democrat. That election was the first time Nebraska's electoral vote was split. In the years since the highly controversial presidential election, bills have been introduced in every state in the country to change the process for selecting electors. During the period of , most Electoral College reform bills proposed switching to the district system.
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