ELI5 - The Electoral Collage

The Electoral College is the system the United States uses to choose its president. It sounds like a school, but it is not a place where people go. It is a process.

Imagine the whole country is a big classroom. The class is voting for a class leader. Instead of counting every single student vote directly, the class breaks into groups. Each group picks a helper. Those helpers do the final choosing. In the United States, each state is like one of those groups. Every state gets a certain number of helpers. These helpers are called electors. The number of electors a state has depends on how many people live there. Big states get more electors. Small states get fewer. Every state gets at least three.

When people vote for president, they are not actually voting directly for the person. They are voting for which set of electors they want their state to send. In most states, the rule is winner takes all. That means if one candidate gets the most votes in that state, even by a tiny bit, they get all of that state’s electors. After the election, the electors meet and officially vote for president. All the electoral votes are counted. To win, a candidate needs more than half of the total electoral votes. Right now, that number is 270 out of 538.

This is why someone can win the presidency even if they do not get the most votes overall. They can win by getting more electoral votes from states, especially large or closely contested ones. The system was created a long time ago. The founders wanted a balance between big states and small states. They also wanted states to have an important role in choosing the president. At the time, travel and communication were slow, so this system felt safer to them. Many people argue about the Electoral College today. Some think it is unfair because it can ignore the popular vote. Others think it protects smaller states from being ignored.

So in simple terms, the Electoral College is a middle step. Voters choose states. States choose electors. Electors choose the president.