A lot has changed in the United States over the past 250 years, including in our government. But the country is still clinging to one arguably outdated relic from its Founders: the Electoral College. Every four years, during the presidential election, we stare at our screens and bite our nails as pundits predict which candidate will get enough electoral votes to win the entire state—which isn’t necessarily the same as the candidate who gets the most votes.
That, of course, has put the Electoral College squarely in the crosshairs of some very angry voters, especially over the last two decades. As the argument goes, the Electoral College may have made sense in 1776, but in 2026, it may need to be tossed into the proverbial dustbin of history. Plus, let’s be honest: It’s just flat-out confusing.
“The world is very different now than it was then, so I understand how people feel frustrated,” says Lindsey Cormack, PhD, an associate professor of political science at Stevens Institute of Technology. “The Founders were dealing with a new, small republic, limited communication, weak development of national parties and a very restricted electorate. Today, we have mass parties, national campaigns, universal adult citizenship voting rights, instant communication, polling, television, the internet and a much stronger expectation that the person with the most votes should win.”
So why was the Electoral College created in the first place, and what (the heck) where the Founding Fathers thinking when they established it? We spoke with Cormack and three other constitutional scholars and political experts to find out. Read on to learn more about the history of the Electoral College—and if it might be on its way out.
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What is the Electoral College, exactly, and how does it work?
The Electoral College is the mechanism in the United States for deciding who will be president. It was the brainchild of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, devised as a compromise. (More on that in a minute.) “Instead of having direct elections of presidents, we add this additional step,” explains Tristan M. Hightower, PhD, an assistant professor of political science at Bryant University. “States are allocated a number of ‘electors’ based on congressional representation, which is, in turn, partly based on population.” Every four years, American citizens vote to determine which presidential candidate those electors will select.
Each state’s number of electors is equal to its total number of members of Congress. “Even the smallest states have at least three electors, since every state has two senators and at least one representative,” says Rodney A. Smolla, a constitutional scholar and professor at Vermont Law and Graduate School. Today, California has the largest number, 54, because it has two senators and 52 members of the House of Representatives. State legislatures determine how their electors will be awarded, Smolla adds.
Who are the electors, and how are they chosen?
For that honor, you have to be nominated by your political party. Typically, these positions go to people who have demonstrated loyalty to their political party. (Think: party leaders and activists, as well as state and local elected officials.) Members of Congress and other federal officials are not permitted to be electors. Electors pledge to vote for their party’s candidate, and in some states, like New Mexico and South Carolina, they’re required to do so by law.
The number of electoral votes in the U.S. has changed 24 times since this system was created. We started off with 69, then increased as the country grew and more states joined the union. In the 1960 election, the U.S. went from having 531 electoral votes to 537. Since the 1964 election, there have been a total of 538 electoral votes in the country, with a majority of the votes—270—needed to elect a president.
Why did the Founders create the Electoral College?
Now back to that compromise we noted above. The Founders needed to find a solution to major disagreement: how the president was selected. At the time, no other country voted directly for their head of state, so the Founders didn’t have a blueprint to work from.
One of the debates at the Constitutional Convention was whether to elect the president by a direct popular vote or an indirect system of election, like having Congress pick the president. “It’s important to remember that the Founding Fathers were not a single ideological bloc,” Hightower says. Founders James Wilson and Gouverneur Morris were in favor of having a popular vote, while James Madison and George Mason were in favor of a congressional vote.
Here’s what ultimately led to the creation of the Electoral College.
They didn’t trust the majority of Americans
While some Founders worried that election by Congress would make the president too dependent on Congress, others worried that direct election by voters was risky in a large, spread-out country with limited information. “Those Founders were also elitists who doubted that average persons were sufficiently well-educated or informed enough to be trusted,” Smolla notes. The Electoral College compromise was the result.
“After deliberating during the summer, [the Founders] created an Electoral College for an indirect election,” says historian Tony Williams, a senior fellow at the Bill of Rights Institute. “They wanted to protect the interests of less-populous states and have a president who represented the national will, rather than one who just won a few large cities. They also feared that a demagogue might appeal to passions and lead voters astray.”
One of the biggest concerns that led to the creation of the Electoral College was a worry about “tyranny of the majority,” Hightower says. “At the time, this type of democracy was largely experimental, and some were worried that too much direct control residing in the masses could lead to mob rule,” he explains. “This indirect selection process could also theoretically limit the possibility of populist leaders who would want to retain power once they got it, since their ability to appeal directly to the people would be limited.”
Racism played a disturbingly large role
Universal suffrage was not a feature in the early days of American democracy. “If you weren’t a White man who paid taxes or owned land, you probably did not have the right to vote,” Hightower says.
In 1787, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were confronted with the question of how the hundreds of thousands of enslaved people living in the country would affect its systems and constitution. More specifically, there was a debate over if and how they would be counted when allocating seats in the House of Representatives, which was based on population.
The Founders came up with the Three-Fifths Compromise, which counted an enslaved person as three-fifths of a person. “The compromise artificially inflated the political power of the slave states, giving them extra representatives in Congress, and thereby also in the Electoral College,” even though enslaved people weren’t given the right to vote or any political rights, Smolla says.
Why do we still have the Electoral College today?
The main reason we still have the Electoral College is because it can only be changed via a constitutional amendment and that would be very difficult. It has changed a little, though, over the years through various amendments.
“The 12th Amendment [passed in 1803] fixed the early problem where electors did not vote separately for president and vice president,” Cormack says. Previously, the runner-up in the presidential electoral vote would become the vice president, instead of a president and vice president running together on a designated ticket. Then, the 23rd Amendment, passed in 1961, gave Washington, D.C., three electoral votes.
But aside from these changes, the Electoral College is structurally very similar to how it was originally designed, Hightower says. “The biggest change has been the size and diversity of the voting population,” he notes. “America looks much different than it did at the founding.”
Does this 1787 decision still make sense in 2026?
It’s debatable.
According to Smolla, who believes that the president and vice president should be determined by popular vote, “the Electoral ollege makes absolutely no sense whatsoever today.” For one, it’s responsible for the artificial influence of a handful of swing states, which often determine the election. “This tends to render irrelevant the votes of many voters in other states, in which it is clear who will likely win the popular vote within that state,” he explains. “If the nation went to a national popular-vote system, every single voter’s vote would be of equal weight—and matter.”
Williams, on the other hand, says the system created in 1787 still makes a great deal of sense because it helps to preserve federalism and the interests of the states. “It also continues to protect smaller states and make the president a national leader of the different interests and geographical regions of the country,” he says. “The new government in the early American republic faced similar challenges in terms of partisan divisions, passions and regional interests. So the Electoral College continues to serve its original purposes.”
Additionally, voting rights have improved exponentially since 1787. “America is a much more diverse place than it was at the founding,” Hightower says. “And, conceivably, that diversity means that popularly elected leaders must appeal to a broader base than they originally would have.”
How has the Electoral College been problematic over the last 250 years?
The main issue is that the winner of the popular vote hasn’t always come out on top. There have been five presidents—John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, George W. Bush and Donald Trump (in 2016)—who did not win the popular vote but were elected through the current system. “There is no logic or justice to support these outcomes,” Smolla says.
There have also been a few other instances where the Electoral College wasn’t the most effective way of choosing a president. “We have some 19th-century examples where the Electoral College either produced a tie, failed to produce a majority winner or generated serious legitimacy disputes, but I think the issues today are more about democratic equality rather than institutional bugs,” Hightower says.
An argument that persists today is the need to protect the rights and voices of small states. “[In 1787], New York and Virginia were powerhouses in terms of population that could, in theory, bulldoze through the interests of smaller states,” Hightower says. “Today, some people contend that many of those states that fill out the middle of the country are vulnerable to the larger states because of their small populations.”
Could the Electoral College ever be abolished?
Sure—but it will probably never happen. It would take a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College, and those are virtually impossible to pass.
“I don’t see it coming,” says Cormack. A constitutional amendment would require two-thirds of both houses of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states. “The swing states benefit very much from the Electoral College in that they get the bulk of campaign dollars and attention, so they would be less likely to agree to such a change,” she adds.
The other possible solution is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. “Under this proposal, if states with enough electoral votes to win the Electoral College—which is 270 total electoral votes—pledge to devote all of those states’ electoral votes to whichever candidate gains the most popular votes nationally, then the president would effectively be chosen by whoever wins the national popular vote,” Smolla explains. So far, 18 states plus Washington, D.C., have joined, adding up to a total of 222 Electoral College votes—48 short of the compact going into effect.
“I don’t think that we’ll see a sufficient number of states sign on, and even if they did, there would be thousands of challenges in the courts, so it’s sort of amend-the-Constitution-or-bust on this one,” Cormack says. Plus, at any given time in history, adds Smolla, one party perceives the current system to be an advantage, and that discourages reform.
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At Reader’s Digest, we’re committed to producing high-quality content by writers with expertise and experience in their field in consultation with relevant, qualified experts. We rely on reputable primary sources, including government and professional organizations and academic institutions as well as our writers’ personal experiences where appropriate. For this piece why the Electoral College was created, Elizabeth Yuko, PhD, tapped her experience as a professor, bioethicist and longtime journalist who often covers history and knowledge for Reader’s Digest. We verify all facts and data, back them with credible sourcing and revisit them over time to ensure they remain accurate and up to date. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.
Sources:
- Lindsey Cormack, PhD, associate professor of political science at Stevens Institute of Technology; email interview, June 8, 2026
- Tristan M. Hightower, PhD, assistant professor of political science in the department of politics, law and society at Bryant University; email interview, June 10, 2026
- Rodney A. Smolla, professor at Vermont Law and Graduate School; email interview, June 2026
- Tony Williams, historian, educator and senior fellow at the Bill of Rights Institute; email interview, June 9, 2026
- The Conversation: “Who invented the Electoral College?”
- League of Women Voters: “The Three-Fifths Compromise and the Electoral College”
- National Archives: “Electoral College History”
- U.S. House of Representatives: “Electoral College Fast Facts”
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