“The Story” of Electoral College

Ehsanul Hoq
3 min readNov 8, 2020

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The Story of Electoral College

We’ve witnessed one of the most nerve-breaking U.S presidential elections in history. An election during the time of a pandemic. A record-breaking election that might change many things in the upcoming days.

But what was more fascinating that we had to wait for days to know the electoral college results of the election. The news channels were broadcasting feeds on the screen, “Road to 270.”

Check the following headlines of some popular news agencies:

  1. Road to 270: Choose potential paths to a White House victory — NBCNews
  2. Electoral College Interactive Maps: The Road to 270 — CNN
  3. The path to 270: How Biden and Trump can each win the presidency — NYTimes

Why Americans use the electoral college voting system and what’s behind it?

Let’s start our journey with this new story…..

History of Electoral College Winners in the U.S States

The electoral college in the United States is a formal body for electing Presidents and Vice Presidents. We all know how the American Presidents have been controlling the globe for years after World War II.

So this electoral college system is the maker of world leaders. The system was established by the U.S constitution Article II, Section 1.

The voters are actually not voting for the Presidents directly but voting for the electors. Each state in the electoral college has electors. The number of electors is limited by the Representatives and Senators in Congress.

The system is surely challenging to get since five times in the history of the country presidential candidates lost despite having popular votes. The election in 2016 was one of the examples where the popular candidate lost the election to the electoral college winner.

However, American citizens have been used to this system where electors more important than the voters.

The modern election is now termed as the first candidate to get 270 of the 538 total electoral votes wins the White House.

the story of electoral college
The Great Compromise was forged in a heated dispute during the 1787 Constitutional Convention: States with larger populations wanted congressional representation based on population, while smaller states demanded equal representation; Source: History.com

The constitutional convention had a great impact on the creation of the electoral college. According to the historical records, there was a great debate to resolve the question, How to elect a President.

The debate went on for months and some of the solutions were-

  1. Congress will elect the President;
  2. Democratic Popular Vote;

After the debate, the American founding fathers made a compromise that shaped the electoral system.

Every 4 years a temporary electoral group is called for the election. The first Presidential candidate to get 270 electoral votes becomes the next President as we’ve seen in the 2020 election.

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

-George Edwards III, emeritus political science professor at Texas A&M University.

The system is not perfect for electing new Presidents according to many experts. Since a great Compromise took place to make a new system for the newly found nation the flaws were kept aside to make a uniform decision.

Now, after hundreds of years, this system is still used by the most dominating nation in the world.

Read my other articles-

“The Story” of the Greenback and “The Story” of Ferrari

Support my cause to share more stories with you in the future.

“The Story” is a regular Medium Blog by Ehsanul Hoq.

Ehsan is a Content Marketer, Financial Researcher, and Musician from Bangladesh.

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Ehsanul Hoq

Hi, I’m Ehsanul hoq. Previously a Banker and a musician, I became a full-time freelance content marketer in 2020. I spend most of my time publishing content.