By 
The US national election year of 2024 has been extraordinary in so many ways. It is understandable that some are worried about the electoral process. Despite the uncertainty, the process will remain intact. The rules governing the Electoral College are encoded in US federal law. The rules cannot be changed without changing the Constitution and federal law. Here’s a refresher on the Electoral College and how the president and vice president are chosen.
How is the president elected?
To win their respective offices, candidates for the offices of the president and vice president must win an absolute majority of the vote in the Electoral College. Each state is allocated a set of electors, which is the sum of the number of seats in the House of Representatives and the seats in the Senate (always two) for that state. Electoral votes in Washington, D.C., are based on population but cannot be larger than the electoral votes of the smallest state. Thus, Washington, D.C., gets three electoral votes. US territories are not entitled to any electoral votes. The Electoral College has a total of 538 electors, so a majority requires at least 270 votes.
How are the electors chosen?
When you vote for a presidential candidate, in reality, you are voting for a set of electors to the Electoral College. Each state determines how its electors are selected.
| First Past the Post/Winner Take All Method | Spread the Vote Around Method |
| 48 States and DC | 2 States (Nebraska and Maine) |
| The candidate that gets the most votes (not necessarily a majority) takes all of the electors. | The candidate that gets the most votes gets two electors. The rest are allocated based on the plurality of votes in each congressional district. |
We won’t know which slate of electors has been chosen until the entire popular vote has been counted. That is a complicated process. Millions of people vote by mail, some for convenience and others out of necessity (e.g., if they are away from home on election day or serving in the military abroad). The government needs to wait for all of the mail-in votes to be delivered, which may be days after election day, and each mail-in ballot must be examined to make sure it was filled out correctly.
The battleground states
Many states typically, but not always, give commanding majorities to one party. For example, California and New York tend to lean strongly Democrat while Texas and Florida tend to lean strongly Republican. Some states have a fairly evenly divided electorate, so those states could easily tip to one party or another. Those are known as the battleground states.
These days, the battleground states appear to be Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Not surprisingly, the presidential candidates are spending a great deal of time and money in those states. In recent elections, the margin of victory for presidential candidates has been narrow in battleground states—just a few thousand votes in some cases. In the elections of 2012, 2016 and 2020, a swing of just 100,000 votes spread over those battleground states could have tipped those elections in the other direction.
It may take a long time for officials to get a complete vote count and confidently declare the winner of the election. In some cases, if the margin of victory is narrow, a recount of the votes may be necessary. There may be legal challenges to the election results in battleground states if irregularities are alleged. A long period of uncertainty could be a strain on popular sentiment and could add a period of greater volatility to financial markets.
When does the Electoral College vote happen?
The popular vote is cast on the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November, as determined by federal law. This year, it is 5 November.
Immediately after the election results in a state are certified, its governor (or in Washington, D.C.’s case, its mayor) sends one of seven original Certificates of Ascertainment to the federal archivist. The federal archivist must receive all certificates by the “safe harbor” date; by this time, any and all legal challenges to the popular vote must be resolved. The safe harbor date this year is 11 December.
State electors, chosen by the winning candidate’s state political party, meet in their respective state capitals on the first Monday after the second Wednesday of December to cast their votes for president and vice president in separate ballots. Again, the date is set by federal law. This year, it is 17 December. Electors are pledged to vote for the winning candidate.
The votes cast by the Electoral College are counted before a joint session of the newly installed Congress. This year, the votes will be tabulated on 6 January, presided over by the vice president acting as the president of the Senate. This is a ceremonial formality, but also a necessary legal step because the president of the Senate declares who won the offices of president and vice president after the vote count.
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Faithless Electors |
What if no one earns a majority of the electoral vote?
It’s unlikely but possible that no candidate earns a majority of the electoral vote. That could happen in the event of a tie or if there are three or more political parties, each of which gets enough votes to prevent any candidate from winning an absolute majority of the vote. In those cases, the House of Representatives would enter a presidential election session, where one vote is assigned to each of the 50 states (Washington, D.C. is excluded because it has no voting members in the House). The House, then, would determine the president by majority vote. The Senate would determine the vice president by majority vote, with each senator casting one vote. In this scenario, the president and vice president need not be members of the same party.
If there is no resolution to the election of the new president, the speaker of the house would become acting president until Congress resolves the issue.
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The House of Representatives last chose the president 200 years ago in the 1824 election, when none of the four major candidates for the presidency secured a majority of the Electoral College. |
When does the presidential term of office expire?
As determined by the Constitution, the presidential term of office will expire on 20 January. That cannot be changed by Congress or the president. On that day, the winner of the election—as determined by the vote of the Electoral College that is counted by Congress, or as determined by the House of Representatives—will be inaugurated as president. In the unlikely event of an election controversy that doesn’t get resolved by the House before 20 January, the speaker of the house would become acting president until the controversy is resolved. The term of the sitting president still expires on 20 January; he or she doesn’t get to stay in office until a decision is made.
It makes no difference to this process if a losing candidate declines to formally concede or refuses to accept the results. The political process would continue anyway.
The US electoral process is complicated, but it has been remarkably stable. In our view, concerns about its electoral stability are misplaced.
The US electoral college rules discussed in this post are sourced from US federal law.
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