(NEXSTAR) – This November, millions of Americans will head to polling stations across the country to cast their votes — not for president or vice president, mind you, but for a slate of electors who will, in turn, hopefully vote for the candidates of their choice.
These electors make up the Electoral College, and the votes they cast in January ultimately determine who runs the country for the next four years.
The system by which a group of electors decides the outcome of the election — rather than the popular vote — was born out of the 1787 Constitutional Convention and established in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution. It was also very much a “compromise” between attendees, according to the National Archives. Delegates at the convention debated the subject for months, with some opposing the idea of Congress selecting the next president (for fear of corruption, partly) and others pushing back on the notion of a popular vote (essentially over concerns that the public was less-informed than their legislatures).
It has also been acknowledged that slavery played a role in solidifying the Electoral College system, as states with large populations of non-voting slaves “could have no influence in the election” if the popular vote determined the president, future president James Madison had observed.
“The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to the fewest objections,” said Madison.
The current Electoral College system isn’t without its critics, either. The way it works now — with each state’s popular vote determining how all of that state’s electors will vote in January (with the exception of Nebraska and Maine) — has been criticized for giving more influence to a handful of swing states, and therefore dictating how and where the candidates campaign in the months leading up to the election.
But the Electoral College is also often questioned when it comes to the accurate representations of how each constituency — and the nation, overall — votes. Since the 1800s, five candidates who have won the popular vote ended up losing in the Electoral College. The most recent instance occurred during the 2016 election, when Hillary Clinton earned nearly 3 million more votes than former President Trump, but earned nearly 80 fewer electoral votes.
There have been more than 700 proposals to overhaul the Electoral College, but changing a system that has been used for centuries is a steep uphill battle, historians say. The “closest” our government came was in 1969, according to the House of Representatives, when the House passed a measure to implement a popular-vote system, with the condition that a runoff election would be held if no candidate was supported by at least 40% of eligible voters. It had “widespread bipartisan support” in the House, but failed in the Senate, the House noted.
It would also be an exhaustive — and exhausting — undertaking to find a new system that would appease enough lawmakers, as James Madison noted over two hundred years ago in an 1823 letter to U.S. District Judge George Hay.
“The difficulty of finding an unexceptionable process for appointing the Executive Organ of a Government such as that of the U. S. was deeply felt by the [1787 Constitutional Convention];” wrote Madison, “and as the final arrangement of it took place in the latter stage of the Session, it was not exempt from a degree of the hurrying influence produced by fatigue and impatience in all such Bodies, tho’ the degree was much less than usually prevails in them.”