Background
Every four years, on the first Tuesday following the first Monday of November, Americans go to the polls to elect the next President of the United States. Although the office of president is a national office, intended to represent the whole country, the way we go about choosing who occupies that office is decidedly not national. Instead, it is a patchwork of elections in the various states, each with its own method of determining who can vote and when and where and how, which culminates in a vote not of the people of the United States, but in a vote by a group of Electors which represent the various states and the District of Columbia. As a group, these electors constitute the Electoral College.

The drafters of the Constitution settled upon the Electoral College as a compromise between those who wanted a direct popular vote and those who wanted the Congress to elect the president. The concept of electors came from the Holy Roman Empire, where an elector was one of a number of princes of the various German states within the Holy Roman Empire who had a right to participate in the election of the German king (who generally was crowned as emperor).

How the Electoral College Works
When U.S. citizens vote for a presidential candidate, we are actually voting for a group of "electors" which represent that candidate in our state. In other words, although the electors don't generally appear on the ballot, a vote for Bush is a vote for Bush's electors; a vote for Kerry is a vote for Kerry's electors.

Each state receives a number of electors in the Electoral College equivalent to the number of its representatives in Congress. The number of Representatives in each state correlates with the state population and is amended every decade when the Census is taken. The number of Senators is always two.

The Electoral College comprises 538 electors - 535 which represent the states in addition to three from the District of Columbia. A simple majority - 270 electoral votes - is required to become president. You can see a breakdown of how many electoral votes each state has here.

You Don't Technically Have the Right to Vote for President
After the controversy in Florida in the 2000 election, the Supreme Court ruled that "the individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States unless and until the state legislature chooses a statewide election as the means to implement its power to appoint electors." Worse yet, the legislature can take back the power at any time. In fact, in 2000, the Florida legislature was threatening to do just that if the courts didn't come to some conclusion by December 12.

When our Constitution was enacted, it was unusual for voters to directly elect anyone. Ten of the 13 original states had their legislatures elect the governor, not the voters. Voters didn't have the right to vote for U.S. Senators either. They were selected by state legislatures until the ratification of the 17th Amendment to the Constitution in 1913. Prior ot the 17th Amendment, some states allowed voters to cast advisory votes that then state legislatures ratified in choosing the states U.S. Senator. This is in essence the system that all states use today for choosing presidential electors. However, there is no guarrantee that a state legislature couldn't chance the rules by which a state appoints electors to disregard the popular vote.

Who gets a state's electoral votes?
All but two states - Maine and Nebraska - use the winner-take-all system of allocating their electoral votes. In this system, the candidate that receives the most popular votes in a state gets all that state's electoral votes. The winning candidate does not need to win a majority of the votes, only a plurality. Maine and Nebraska each give two electoral votes to the winner of the statewide popular vote, and distribute their remaining electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote in each of their congressional districts.

What Happens if No Candidate Receives a Majority of a State's Votes?
If no candidate gets a majority, then the candidate who has the most votes (called a plurality) wins all of the state's electoral votes.

Colorado's Amendment 36
Voters in Colorado will vote in the 2004 election whether to switch to a third system - proportional representation - in which the candidates get a number of the state's nine electoral votes roughly equal to the percentage of the popular vote which they received. Amendment 36 is intended to go into effect for the 2004 election, which has made in controversial. Should amendment 36 pass, it will likely be challenged in Court, so it is unclear if it actually will go into effect for this election.

What happens if no candidate wins a majority in the Electoral College?
If no candidate receives the required 270 electoral votes, the election moves to the U.S. Congress, where the House of Representatives determines the next President and the Senate picks the next vice-president. In selecting the president, each state delegation the House casts one vote for President. No mechanism exists for ensuring that a majority of the House settles upon a candidate.

View historical results of Electoral College elections here.

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