What is the electoral college and how does it work?

Eligible US voters on election day don’t select the President directly. They are voting for 538 electors instead, who meet in their respective states and vote for President and Vice President. The number is 538 as there are 100 senators (2 per state) and 438 representatives (distributed by population). These electors comprise the Electoral College.

Each state, no matter how populous, gets at least three electors, and the remaining are in proportion to the population of the state. For example, California, the most populous state, has 53 congressmen and two senators, and gets 55 electoral votes. In a sense, on election day voters are telling their states how they want it to use its electoral votes, and the electors vote for the president on behalf of the people in their state.

To win the presidency, 270 electoral votes are needed to get a majority of the Electoral College. The number of electors cannot change without a constitutional amendment, but electors allocated to each state can change every 10 years. In the electoral college system, the candidate with the highest number of votes in a state claims all of the state’s electoral votes. For example, Trump claimed all 29 electoral votes of Florida, winning the election over Clinton by a margin of 2.2 per cent.


Some called the electoral college a ‘winner-takes-all' system, as small margins in the key states with large populations (and thus more electors) can tilt the US elections in one party’s favour. This concept of ‘swing states’ will be something Democratic candidate Joe Biden will have to face in the upcoming election, knowing that Donald Trump used this very system to clinch victory.