U.S. political parties disagree about Electoral College system after Biden win

Following Biden’s victory, Democrats are calling to end the electoral college. The electoral college system is not perfect – it’s got one major quirk: The candidate who wins presidency may not be the one who get the most popular votes.

The presidential election system is responsible for two major presidential losses for Democrats in recent decades, even when the Democratic candidates won the popular vote, and other times in history. Hayes in 1876, Harrison in 1888 and Bush in 2000, and Trump in 2016.

Though unlikely, in theory, Trump could get more electors in December’s vote, even though Biden won the popular vote.

The “founding fathers,” framers of the U.S. Constitution, came up with this process. Under this system, Americans do not actually vote directly for a president and vice president. Instead, voters select a group of people, who pledge to vote for their chosen candidate. These people are known as the “electors.”

The founding fathers thought, due to distance between states and time limits, that it would be too chaotic to vote directly. Instead, an electoral college system would make it easier to count votes.

The “Electoral College” includes 538 presidential electors who come to give their official votes for president and vice president of the United States. The 12th Amendment, ratified in 1804, changed the original process, allowing for separate ballots for determining the president and vice president.

Each U.S. state gets a different number of electors, equal to the number of that state’s senators (always two), plus its number of Congressional representatives, determined by the size of this state’s population.

Republicans have benefited from the system more than Democrats, so there is disagreement about how the system should be changed.

Former presidential candidate and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has previously said that it’s “hard to defend” the Constitution’s current system for allocating electors, which heavily weights rural states and minimizes the impact of large urban centres. He has called for re-examining “the concept of the electoral college.”

But Senate majority leader and Senator Mitch McConnell told reporters on Capitol Hill, “It’s not unusual, should not be alarming. At some point here, we’ll find out finally who was certified in each of these states. The Electoral College will determine the winner.”

The vast majority of U.S. states have a winner-takes- all system. Whoever wins the most popular votes in that states gets all of the state’s electoral votes. But that means if one candidate receives 55% of the vote, the 45% who voted for the other candidate are not represented in the electoral college count.

In most cases, political parties choose their electors based on party service and party loyalty, to reduce the chance of electors “switching sides.” For this reason, it’s unlikely that Trump will win the Electoral College vote on Dec. 14.