The Electoral College website now has an easy-to-remember address. Make sure to update your bookmarks! The Electoral College is a process, not a place. The Founding Fathers established it in the Constitution, in part, as a compromise between the election of the President by a vote in Congress and election of the President by a popular vote of qualified citizens.
The Electoral College process consists of the selection of the electors , the meeting of the electors where they vote for President and Vice President, and the counting of the electoral votes by Congress. The Electoral College consists of electors. A majority of electoral votes is required to elect the President. In this plan, Congress plays a formal role in the election of the President and Vice President.
The provisions for electing the President and Vice President have been among the most amended in the Constitution. Initially, electors voted for two individuals without differentiating between the ballot for President and Vice President.
The winner of the largest bloc of votes, so long as it was a majority of all the votes cast, would win the presidency. The individual with the second largest number of votes would become Vice President. In , this meant that John Adams became President and Thomas Jefferson became Vice President despite opposing each other for the presidency.
The presidential election further tested the presidential selection system when Jefferson and Aaron Burr, the Republican candidates for President and Vice President, tied at 73 electoral ballots each. The Constitution mandates that House Members vote as a state delegation and that the winner must obtain a simple majority of the states. The House deadlocked at eight states for Jefferson, six for Burr, and two tied.
After six days of debate and 36 ballots, Jefferson won 10 state delegations in the House when the Burr supporters in the two tied states Vermont and Maryland filed blank ballots rather than support Jefferson.
After the experiences of the and elections, Congress passed, and the states ratified, the 12th Amendment to the Constitution. Added in time for the election, the amendment stipulated that the electors would now cast two votes: one for President and the other for Vice President. While states varied in how they selected presidential electors through the 19th century, electors today are uniformly popularly elected rather than appointed and pledged to support a given candidate.
Since the 12th Amendment, one other presidential election has come to the House. In , Andrew Jackson of Tennessee won a plurality of the national popular vote and 99 votes in the Electoral College—32 short of a majority. Speaker of the House Henry Clay had 37 and expected to use his influence in the House to win election. But the 12th Amendment required the House to consider only the top-three vote-getters when no one commands an overall majority.
The House chose Adams over Jackson. Was there ever witnessed such a bare faced corruption in any country before? At the end of the count, the Vice President then announces the name of the next President. Since , 3 U. During the Joint Session, lawmakers may object to individual electoral votes or to state returns as a whole.
An objection must be declared in writing and signed by at least one Representative and one Senator. In the case of an objection, the Joint Session recesses and each chamber considers the objection separately for no more than two hours; each Member may speak for five minutes or less. After each house votes on whether to accept the objection, the Joint Session reconvenes and both chambers disclose their decisions. If both chambers agree to the objection, the electoral votes in question are not counted.
If either chamber opposes the objection, the votes are counted. Originally, the Electoral College provided the Constitutional Convention with a compromise between two main proposals: the popular election of the President and the election of the President by Congress.
There have been other attempts to change the system, particularly after cases in which a candidate wins the popular vote, but loses in the Electoral College. The closest Congress has come to amending the Electoral College since was during the 91st Congress — when the House passed H.
The resolution cleared the House to 70, but failed to pass the Senate. The election of the President goes to the House of Representatives. Each state delegation casts a single vote for one of the top three contenders from the initial election to determine a winner.
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