There are many reasons why people both agree and disagree with the Electoral College, the system with which Americans elect their president every four years.

Does Your Vote Count? A Look into the Electoral College

Here are some of the more major pros and cons to the current practice:


It’s pretty accurate. The Electoral College has a more than 90 percent success rate,” says Thomas Neale, elections expert at the Library of Congress, meaning electors have chosen the candidate who won the popular vote more than nine out of 10 times.

The winner wins with a clear majority. Because 48 states use the “winner take all” method, “all you have to do is get 50 percent [of the popular vote] plus one and you get all the electoral votes,” says Neale. It avoids the possibility of an election with “50 Floridas” (a reference to the 2000 election)—in which states end up recounting popular votes.

A president for all the people. “The biggest thing the Electoral College does for us is ensure that the presidential candidates have to reach out to a variety of people,” says Tara Ross. No one region—Midwest, East Coast, etc.—has enough electoral votes to elect a president. So even someone who’s a regional favorite (say, Hillary Clinton in the Southeast) still has to reach out to other regions to win.


It’s not purely democratic. You’re voting for “people you expect will vote for who you want as president and vice president,” says Neale. That means that sometimes the candidate who gets the majority of the popular vote doesn’t win, as happened in 2000 when Al Gore won 543,895 more votes than George W. Bush, yet Bush won the majority of electoral votes and the presidency.

Swing states get all the attention.  Utah hasn’t voted for a Democrat since 1964; Minnesota hasn’t voted for a Republican since 1972. Candidates tend to ignore states like that and focus on states that might “swing” to their side. “People don’t think about the fact that the presidential election boils down to nine states,” says James A. Thurber, head of American University’s Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies. “Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.”


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