Freedom Corner: Electoral College History Reveals Pros and Cons

Five times in history, presidential candidates have won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College. This has led some to question why Americans use this system to elect their presidents.

According to an Oct. 9, 2025, article by Dave Roos on www.history.com, among the questions debated by the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, one of the hardest to resolve was how to elect the president.

He said the delegates debated, with some arguing that Congress should pick the president and others insisting on a democratic popular vote.

Their compromise was the Electoral College.

Roos wrote the system calls for the creation every four years of a temporary group of electors equal to the total number of representatives in Congress. Technically, it is these electors, and not the American people, who vote for the president. 

In modern elections, the candidate who gets at least 270 of the 538 total electoral votes wins the White House.

The Electoral College was never intended to be the “perfect” system for picking the president, according to George Edwards III, emeritus political science professor at Texas A&M University.

“It wasn’t like the Founders said, ‘Hey, what a great idea! This is the preferred way to select the chief executive, period,” Edwards said. “They were tired, impatient, frustrated. They cobbled together this plan because they couldn’t agree on anything else.”

At the time of the Philadelphia convention, Roos wrote, no other country in the world directly elected its chief executive, so the delegates were wading into uncharted territory. 

Out of those debates came a compromise based on the idea of electoral intermediaries. These intermediaries wouldn’t be picked by Congress or elected by the people. Instead, the states would each appoint independent “electors” who would cast the actual ballots for the presidency.

But determining exactly how many electors to assign to each state was another sticking point. Here the divide was between slave-owning and non-slave-owning states. 

Roos said in 1787, roughly 40 percent of people living in the Southern states were enslaved Black people, who couldn’t vote.

James Madison from Virginia, where enslaved people accounted for 60 percent of the population, knew that either a direct presidential election, or one with electors divided up according to free white residents only, wouldn’t fly in the South.

“The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern states,” Madison said, “and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes.”

The result was the “three-fifths compromise,” Roos wrote, in which three-fifths of the enslaved Black population would be counted toward allocating representatives and electors and calculating federal taxes. The compromise ensured that Southern states would ratify the Constitution and gave Virginia a quarter (12) of the total electoral votes required to win the presidency (46).

There were no political parties in 1787, Roos wrote. The drafters of the Constitution assumed that electors would vote according to their individual discretion, not the dictates of a state or national party. 

Roos said the Constitution says nothing about how the states should allot their electoral votes. But over time, all but two states (Maine and Nebraska) passed laws to give all their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the state’s popular vote count. 

In a Nov. 30, 2020, interview with Connecticut Public Radio, former Connecticut Secretary of State Denise Merrill described how Connecticut selects its electors.

 “In Connecticut, we do require that electors vote for whoever won the popular vote in the state. And the party then selects through some process of their own these seven electors,” she said.

In an Oct. 8, 2024, article on www.rutgers.edu, William Field, a teaching professor at Rutgers University, wrote the main argument against the Electoral College system is that it is very possible to win the presidency without winning a majority of votes cast.

That happened most recently in 2000 and 2016. George Bush was elected president in 2000 despite getting 550,000 fewer votes than Al Gore. In 2016, Donald Trump was elected despite winning 1.3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. 

 The Electoral College has brought arguments for and against reform. 

In a Dec. 3, 2024, article by Anthony Sinclair on www.congress.net, he outlines arguments against reform. Sinclair writes the Electoral College preserves the sovereignty of individual states in the presidential election process.

The Electoral College acts as a safeguard against the “tyranny of the majority,” Sinclair writes, by preventing a candidate from winning the presidency solely through overwhelming support in densely populated areas. It promotes balance and geographical diversity in the electoral process, he said.

In addition, he said, the Electoral College has been an integral part of the American electoral system since the founding of the nation.

“It has provided stability and continuity in presidential elections, minimizing the risk of radical or abrupt changes in national leadership,” Sinclair wrote.

Field said there are calls to abolish the Electoral College and elect the president by a pure popular vote, but this would require amending the Constitution.

“We have a built-in pro-Republican bias since many of the small states, like Montana, are rural and ‘deep red,’ and the small states like their outsized influence and the political bias that extra influence provides, so getting their support would be hard,” he said.

There is a proposal, Field said, called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which would create a system that would retain the Electoral College, but would force the electors to adhere to the national popular vote outcome.

“Under this proposal, state legislators would pass into law a resolution requiring their electors to vote for the candidate who won the most votes nationally, regardless of who won in any specific state,” he said. “So far, 17 states have passed this law covering 209 electoral votes. The compact will take effect when states holding 270 votes have signed on.”