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In most ordinary presidential election years, the Electoral College is a mere formality, and the convening of its electors to cast their votes barely registers as a blip on the general public’s radar screen.
This year is far from ordinary.
With President Donald J. Trump continuing to cry foul over his loss to President-elect Joseph R. Biden, as he has for the last six weeks, news outlets covered the individual state sessions in real time throughout the day on Monday.
One by one, all 50 states and District of Columbia had their electors step forward to represent the will of the voters and officially elect the next president. Biden is expected to end the day with 306 electoral votes – 36 more than is necessary for him to become the 46th president of the United States. Trump is expected to net 232 electoral votes.
Electoral College voting began at 10 a.m. Eastern Time.
The process of electing the next president, or at least of determining which candidate was chosen by the majority of voters in each state, was drawn out this year due in large part to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, which prompted many states to expand mail-in voting practices.
In an effort to avoid crowded polling places on Election Day, which might increase the risk of voters spreading COVID-19, states allowed more voters than ever to cast their ballots by mail.
Counting the millions of mail-in ballots took considerably more time, and in some states, like the battleground state of Pennsylvania, election officials were prevented by law from starting the count until the in-person polls closed on election night.
The contentious presidential race also drew a record high number of votes cast.
Meanwhile, Trump and his supporters began questioning the expanded mail-in voting measures in court in the weeks leading up to the Nov. 3 election, challenged many states and voting districts on Election Day, and waged dozens of legal actions contesting election results in the days after the election.
Trump has refused to concede the race despite losing to Biden in both the projected Electoral College count and the national popular vote by more than 7 million votes. He has insisted millions of “illegal votes” were counted in favor of Biden and that the election was “stolen” from him. Numerous court cases have yielded no evidence of large-scale impropriety.
All the conflict around the election results has thrust the formerly mundane Electoral College into the spotlight with many political leaders and strategists pointing to it as the likely end of the tumult.
The Founding Fathers created the Electoral College as a compromise meant to level the political playing field between large, populous states and smaller, less populated ones. Under the system, states are allotted a number of electors based on the size of their congressional delegation. They get one elector for each senator and representative they have.
The District of Columbia gets three electors even though it does not have a voting member of the House of Representatives.
California currently has the most electoral votes, 55. Texas has the next highest, with 38, while New York and Florida each have 29 and Illinois and Pennsylvania get 20 each. The states with the fewest electoral votes, three, are Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming.
The Republican and Democratic committees in each state nominate their respective Electoral College delegates and though their names are not on the ballots, voters are essentially voting for them, and not the actual presidential candidates. In all but two states, the candidate who wins the most votes gets all the state’s electors. In Maine and Nebraska, the top vote getter wins two electors and the remaining electors are chosen by the winning candidate in each of the states’ individual Congressional districts.
It is possible for an Electoral College elector to go rogue and cast a vote for a candidate other than the one the majority of the state’s voters chose. In that case, the elector is considered a faithless elector, and can be replaced by the state or punished, according to a recently established Supreme Court precedent.
The final Electoral College votes must be sent to the president of the Senate – who is also the vice president – by Dec. 23. The votes are counted in open session on Jan. 6. A floor debate over the Electoral College results can take place on that day if one member of each chamber of Congress questions the outcome.
Inauguration day is Jan. 20.
By 3 p.m. Eastern Time Monday, Biden’s Electoral College vote total was at 171 and Trump’s was 155.
Once all the Electoral College votes have been cast and the state electors have finished their work, President-elect Biden was expected to make a public address.
What are your thoughts about the Electoral College system? Tell us what you think in the comments below.
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7 thoughts onElectoral College Vote Held As Biden Plans the Future, Trump Protests Results
It needs to be abolished please add me
If we abolish the electorial college, we would no longer have equal and fare representation to include the smaller less populated states. What we would have is the larger populated states such as California and New York for example dictating to the whole of all the country what direction we would take, LIKE IT OR NOT!! This would deliver us a mob rule that is why one person one vote 3rd world countries usually self destruct in a coup, or voter fraud.
Dude, that’s not how it works anymore! Mob Rule What are you talking about???? You just googled that. That was back in the 19th century before television and the internet when the small states didn’t know what candidate was running and what their platform was… LOL. THERE IS NOTHING MORE FAIR THAN ABOLISHING THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE
The Electoral College should be abolished! Our voices should matter one by one!
Rachel,
I agree get rid of it…
Every election we are told every vote counts make sure you cast your vote, but in the end only a select few matter, cancelling out the Majority Vote.
It gets to where it’s a waste of time to got out and vote for our rights.
Julie
We the people demand all these bad people be held for treason and sot we are tired
The Electoral College should be abolished.