It is a common misconception that the United States
is a pure democracy, but American voters do not directly elect the president of
the United States. Rather, as set up in Article II of the Constitution,
electors from each individual state nominally cast ballots for the president
and vice-president in the electoral college.
Every state (and the District of Columbia) has a
number of electoral college members equal to the number of representatives and
senators in that state. There is a minimum of 3 members, in states such as
Alaska and Montana, and a maximum of 54 members in California. Securing a
majority of 270 electoral votes (out of a possible 538) ensures that the
candidate will go on to the White House. Therefore, a candidate can actually
become president by winning the electoral contest but losing the popular
vote—which is what cost Grover Cleveland the 1888 election, and more recently
resulted in George W. Bush becoming president in 2000.
The electoral college was originally created to
keep the vote in the hands of the people and downplay partisan politics.
Ironically, modern critics find the winner-take-all approach of the electoral
college unfair because it takes the vote out of the hands of people and may
fail to reflect the popular national will by unfairly skewing the importance of
individual votes in certain states. The electoral votes are won wholly,
county-by-county then state-by-state, regardless of whether a majority is
decided by one vote or one million votes. This process has resulted in extremely
close presidential races in the election years of 2000, 2004, and 2008.
Those recent elections have proven the importance
of the popular vote in the process of electing a president. The right to vote
is the most basic bedrock of the freedoms we, as American citizens, have.
