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Mobile Newsletter chat subscribe. Prev NEXT. Each state's number of electors for the , and elections. Cite This! Print Citation. More Awesome Stuff.
Featured Search the People of the House. Majority Leaders. Bean Soup! Featured Black Americans in Congress. Featured Mace of the U. House of Represen- tatives. House Trivia Timeline. Featured Resources for National History Day Fast Facts The founders struggled for months to devise a way to select the President and Vice President.
Historical Highlight February 01, The electoral vote count of the presidential election. Electors Most states require that all electoral votes go to the candidate who receives the most votes in that state. House of Representatives About this object The contested Presidential election brought Senators, and the electoral certificates under investigation, into the House Chamber.
Eisenhower the winner. Office of the Historian: history mail. A majority of electoral votes currently of is required to win. If no candidate receives a majority, then the President is elected by the House of Representatives and the Vice President is elected by the Senate , a process known as contingent election.
The Constitutional Convention of considered several methods of electing the President, including selection by Congress, by the governors of the states, by the state legislatures, by a special group of Members of Congress chosen by lot and by direct popular election. Late in the convention, the matter was referred to the Committee of Eleven on Postponed Matters, which devised the Electoral College system in its original form.
This plan, which met with widespread approval by the delegates, was incorporated into the final document with only minor changes. Constitution, Article II, section 1. In order to forestall partisan intrigue and manipulation, the electors assemble in their respective states and cast their ballots as state units, rather than meet at a central location.
At least one of the candidates for whom the electors vote must be an inhabitant of another state. A majority of electoral votes is necessary to elect, a requirement intended to insure broad acceptance of a winning candidate, while election by the House was provided as a default method in the event of Electoral College deadlock. Finally, Congress was empowered to set nationwide dates for choice and meeting of electors. All the foregoing structural elements of the Electoral College system remain in effect currently.
The original method of electing the President and Vice President, however, proved unworkable, and was replaced by the 12th Amendment, ratified in Under the original system, each elector cast two votes for President for different candidates , and no vote for Vice President.
The votes were counted and the candidate receiving the most votes, provided it was a majority of the number of electors, was elected President, and the runner-up became Vice President. The 12th Amendment replaced this system with separate ballots for President and Vice President, with electors casting a single vote for each office.
A map of the Electoral College with the number of votes allocated to each state for the presidential election, As the republic evolved, so did the Electoral College system, and, by the late 19th century, the following range of constitutional, legal and political elements were in place on both a state and federal level:.
The Constitution gives each state a number of electors equal to the combined total of its Senate membership two for each state and House of Representatives delegation currently ranging from one to 55, depending on population.
The 23rd Amendment provides an additional three electors to the District of Columbia. The number of electoral votes per state thus currently ranges from three for seven states and D. The total number of electors each state gets are adjusted following each decennial census in a process called reapportionment, which reallocates the number of Members of the House of Representatives to reflect changing rates of population growth or decline among the states.
Popular Election of Electors. Today, all presidential electors are chosen by voters, but in the early republic, more than half the states chose electors in their legislatures, thus eliminating any direct involvement by the voting public in the election.
This practice changed rapidly after the turn of the nineteenth century, however, as the right to vote was extended to an ever-wider segment of the population.
As the electorate continued to expand, so did the number of persons able to vote for presidential electors: Its present limit is all eligible citizens age 18 or older. The tradition that the voters choose the presidential electors thus became an early and permanent feature of the Electoral College system, and, while it should be noted that states still theoretically retain the constitutional right to choose some other method, this is extremely unlikely.
The existence of the presidential electors and the duties of the Electoral College are so little noted in contemporary society that most American voters believe that they are voting directly for a President and Vice President on Election Day.
Although candidates for elector may be well-known persons, such as governors, state legislators or other state and local officials, they generally do not receive public recognition as electors. Presidential electors in contemporary elections are expected, and in many cases pledged, to vote for the candidates of the party that nominated them.
While there is evidence that the founders assumed the electors would be independent actors, weighing the merits of competing presidential candidates, they have been regarded as agents of the public will since the first decade under the Constitution. They are expected to vote for the presidential and vice presidential candidates of the party that nominated them. Notwithstanding this expectation, individual electors have sometimes not honored their commitment, voting for a different candidate or candidates than the ones to whom they were pledged.
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