Missouri Republican Sen. Roy Blunt indicators an official tally of the Electoral School votes from the 2016 presidential election, in January 2017. AP Picture/Zach Gibson

On Dec. 14, the members of the Electoral School will meet in state capitols throughout the nation and forged their ballots for president and vice chairman. The anticipated vote complete: 306 for Democrat Joe Biden and 232 for Republican Donald Trump. It will likely be their votes – not the votes of the almost 160 million Individuals who forged ballots on or earlier than Nov. 3 – that may decide whose presidential time period will start on Jan. 20, 2021.

Over the previous a number of months, The Dialog has requested students of the Electoral School to elucidate how this method was developed and the way it works and to explain whether or not – and the way – it provides benefits to sure individuals primarily based on the place they reside. We’ve collected highlights from a number of of these articles right here.

These 11 males agreed on a compromise that created the Electoral School.

The Dialog, from Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-ND

1. The place did it come from?

Delegates to the Constitutional Conference in 1787 debated three potential methods to choose a president, explains Purdue College civics educator Philip J. VanFossen: “election by Congress, choice by state legislatures and a well-liked election – although the correct to vote was typically restricted to white, landowning males.”

The concept of a well-liked election – the place the candidate who bought essentially the most votes received – was enticing. However the 11 committee members realized the Southern states wouldn’t agree, as a result of they needed to wield extra political energy primarily based on their possession of enslaved individuals.

They finally settled, VanFossen writes, on “a system of electors, by means of which each the individuals and the states would assist select the president. [It] was a partly nationwide and partly federal resolution, and … mirrored different constructions within the Structure.”

That system assigned two U.S. senators to every state, and plenty of U.S. representatives primarily based on states’ relative populations – and plenty of electors equal to the sum of the senators and representatives. No state would have fewer than three electors, irrespective of how few individuals lived there.

2. Benefiting much less populous states

That system means voters in several states are handled in another way, writes LaGrange School political scientist John Tures.

As he explains, “some critics have complained that the Electoral School system encourages candidates to disregard voters in smaller states like Oklahoma and Mississippi, as an alternative specializing in campaigning in massive states like California and New York, which have a number of electoral votes.”

However in actuality, the Electoral School provides a bonus to voters in much less populous states, Tures finds: “[V]oters in small states have extra Electoral School votes per capita than bigger, extra various states, utilizing a number of completely different measures – and subsequently extra energy to decide on a president than they’d have in a nationwide standard election.”

He notes {that a} comparable system for electing Georgia’s governor was overturned in 1963 in a U.S. Supreme Courtroom “ruling that it violated the elemental precept of ‘one individual, one vote.’”

3. A matter of race

Ignoring that precept has repercussions as we speak, experiences political scientist William Blake of the College of Maryland, Baltimore County: “The system continues to present extra energy to states whose populations are whiter and extra racially resentful.”

His evaluation of states’ racial breakdowns and electoral votes finds that “states whose individuals exhibit extra intense anti-Black attitudes, primarily based on their solutions to a collection of survey questions, are inclined to have extra electoral votes per individual.” That’s a measure of what number of electoral votes a state has in proportion to the quantity of people that reside there.

Statistically, he discovered that “if two states’ inhabitants numbers point out every would have 10 electoral votes, however one had considerably extra racial resentment, the extra illiberal state would possible have 11.”

4. Weak to interference

The Electoral School makes American democracy extra weak to hackers, fraudsters and others who may search to change the outcomes, explains mathematician Steven Heilman at USC Dornsife.

Noting that “altering simply 269 votes in Florida from George W. Bush to Al Gore would have modified the result of the whole [2000] nationwide election,” Heilman highlights simply how shut so many nationwide elections have been over the course of the nation’s historical past.

As he particulars, “The Electoral School divides one massive election into 51 smaller ones – one for every state, plus the District of Columbia. Mathematically talking, this method is constructed to just about guarantee slender victories, making it very prone to efforts to vary both voters’ minds or the data of their selections.”

Maine’s electors take their oaths earlier than casting their ballots in December 2016.

Derek Davis/Portland Portland Press Herald through Getty Photographs

5. Is there a greater manner?

Westminster School political scientist Joshua Holzer describes the assorted ways in which completely different nations decide their presidents, and “discovered higher human rights protections in nations that elect presidents who’re supported by a majority of voters – which is one thing U.S. Electoral School doesn’t assure.”

He explains plurality voting – a technique extensively used throughout the U.S., by which the one that will get essentially the most votes wins. He additionally seems at runoff voting, with “doubtlessly two rounds of voting. If somebody wins greater than half the votes within the first spherical, that candidate is asserted the winner. If not, the 2 candidates with essentially the most first-round votes face off in a second spherical of voting.”

After laying out different variations, together with contingent voting and ranked-choice voting, that permit voters categorical extra nuanced preferences, Holzer concludes with an outline of an effort that’s underway proper now, to successfully convert the Electoral School system right into a nationwide standard vote.

However, as he observes, that will include its personal issues – simply completely different ones.

Editor’s word: This story is a roundup of articles from The Dialog’s archives.