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The voter selection process can be an “insider’s game,” said Kimberly Wehle, a professor at the University of Baltimore and author of “What You Need to Know About Voting and Why.” They are often state legislators, party leaders or donors, he said.
How many electoral votes does it take to win?
The significant number is 270. There are a total of 538 electoral votes at stake in all 50 states and Washington, DC The total number of electoral votes assigned to each state varies by population, but each state has at least three, and the District of Columbia has had three voters since 1961.
Are all the states where the winner takes all?
Most are, and it helps to think about voting state by state, said Professor Amar.
“It’s like tennis,” he said. “It’s how many sets you win and not how many games or points you win. You have to win the set, and in our system, you have to win the state. “
Two exceptions are Maine and Nebraska, which depend on congressional districts to distribute electoral votes. The winner of the popular vote of the state gets two electoral votes and one vote is awarded to the winner of the popular vote in each congressional district.
There are arguments that states with smaller populations are overrepresented in the Electoral College, because each state has at least 3 electors regardless of population. In one stark example, sparsely populated Wyoming has three votes and a population of roughly 580,000, giving its individual voters far more influence in elections than their millions of counterparts in densely populated states like Florida, California, and New York. And U.S. citizens living in territories like Puerto Rico, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands are not represented by any elector.
“When you talk about the Electoral College shaping elections, it shapes elections all the time because it focuses on certain states and not others,” said Alexander Keyssar, professor of history and social policy at the University of Harvard.
Will the system ever change?
For years there have been debates about the total abolition of the Electoral College, and the 2016 elections have brought the debate to the surface. It was even a topic of conversation among the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates.
