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Almost every American has either studied something about the Electoral College in school or at least heard of it. Yet to many people used to electing municipal, state, and federal officials by the democratic principle “the one who gets the most votes always wins,” the Electoral College looks quite mysterious and antiquated. The mystery concerns how such a system could have existed for so long, and why it has not been replaced by a system that is based on the above democratic principle. In contrast, people who are curious about the election system often try to grasp (a) how the Electoral College could have emerged in the first place, and (b) what could have been the Founding Fathers’ logic of designing the system for electing a President and a Vice President. This Chapter considers the Electoral College origins and analyzes a logical mistake made by the originators of the Constitution, which still remains in its text, as well as the election problems that were overlooked by the Founding Fathers in the original design of the Constitution.

Today’s Electoral College and the one created by the Founding Fathers are two different election mechanisms. The Founding Fathers might have expected that the Electoral College would only select the candidates for both the Presidency and the Vice Presidency, and Congress would choose both executives from among the selected candidates. In any case, the equality of the states in electing both executives in Congress was expected to compensate for the inequality of the states in the Electoral College. This chapter discusses the current election system and attempts to help the reader comprehend whether this system is a historical anachronism or a unique element of the system of “checks and balances” embedded in the Constitution. This chapter presents a list of constitutional articles and amendments relating to the election system, along with a brief description of how each of these parts of the Constitution affects the functioning of the system. It discusses the basic principles of the current election system, along with seven puzzles of the Twelfth Amendment that have remained unsolved since its ratification in 1804.

Contingent U.S. presidential elections are those in which the Electoral College fails to elect a President and (or) a Vice President, and Congress is to elect either executive or both. Contingent elections of a Vice President may emerge independently of whether a President is elected in the Electoral College. This is possible due to the principle of voting separately for President and for Vice President in the Electoral College. This chapter considers all types of contingent elections, including those in which even Congress fails to elect either executive or both by Inauguration Day. This chapter offers an analysis of whether the Presidential Succession Act can govern contingent elections in which neither executive is elected by Inauguration Day. It also discusses whether the existing constitutional provisions and federal statutes allow one to avoid election stalemates and shows that this depends on how some phrases from the Twelfth and the Twentieth Amendments are construed.

The Electoral College has its internal logic and mathematics that are not easy to understand in depth. Constitutionally, a person voted for as President in the Electoral College and received any majority of votes from all the appointed electors (as a result of counting these electoral votes in Congress in the January that follows the election year) becomes President. (This is, however, the case provided this person meets all the constitutional eligibility requirements of the office of President.) However, since the 1824 election, votes cast in all the states that appoint their electors by holding popular elections have been tallied. This tally of votes cast (nowadays) in 50 states and in D.C. for electors of presidential candidates does not have any constitutional status. Yet it is customarily considered as the popular vote that presidential candidates receive nationwide. This chapter analyzes the conceptions of (a) the popular vote, (b) the voting power of a voter (c) the voting power of a state, and (d) the will of the nation in a presidential election, along with their customary understanding by a sizable part of the American people. The chapter presents percentages of the popular vote that could have elected President one of the candidates in the elections held from 1948 to 2004.

Under the current presidential election system, a set of 51 concurrent elections—in each of the 50 states and in D.C—constitute a presidential election. Campaigning throughout the country requires every presidential candidate to spend financial resources as effectively as possible. Each candidate has limited time to demonstrate to the voters that she/he is the best fit to be President, and the amount of time remaining before Election Day decreases with every passing day. This chapter focuses on how the Electoral College affects campaign strategies of presidential candidates, and how this election mechanism helps evaluate strategic and tactical abilities of the candidates. The chapter provides verbal formulations of problems to be solved by the teams of presidential candidates in planning election campaigns. It demonstrates the analogy of these problems to pattern problems solved in transportation systems. This analogy allows one to use well-developed software for solving both mathematical programming and discrete optimization problems in planning and analyzing election campaigns. The chapter discusses two extreme election strategies aimed at throwing the election into Congress in an attempt of a presidential candidate to win the Presidency there, by bypassing the Electoral College.

Should the country replace the Electoral College-based presidential election system with a direct popular election of a President? In the United States, many people believe it should though numerous attempts to do it , by amending the Constitution, have failed. This chapter attempts to describe the National Popular Vote plan aimed at introducing a direct popular election of a President , without amending the Constitution. This chapter presents the arguments that suggest that the plan may violate the Supreme Court decisions relating to the manner in which the plan proposes to award electoral votes in state-signatories to the plan. That is, this manner may violate the Equal Protection Clause from the Fourteenth Amendment. This chapter provides numerical examples suggesting that the claims of the NPV plan originators that the plan would encourage the candidates to chase every vote throughout the country are no more than wishful thinking. The reasoning presented in the chapter may help the reader decide whether the plan is an “ingenious” idea, or a dead-on-arrival, unconstitutional proposal.

The current U.S. presidential election system is quite complicated, and many Americans prefer a simple system they can better understand. Today, the “winner- take-all” method for awarding state electoral votes makes the will of the states matter and the will of the nation as a whole irrelevant in electing a President. Any direct popular election would make the will of the nation as a whole matter and the will of the states irrelevant. Thus, replacing the current system with a direct popular election system would mean replacing one extreme approach to electing a President with another. This chapter presents the author’s plan to improve the current election system, which keeps the Electoral College, but uses it only as a back-up election mechanism. The plan would provide the same principle of equal representation of the will of the nation as a whole and the will of the states in electing a President that exists in Congress in making any bill a federal law. Under the author’s plan, direct popular elections of a President and a Vice President would determine the will of the states and the will of the nation as a whole, and the states would be considered as equal members of the Union. Since the plan uses the current election system as a back-up mechanism, the chapter proposes a new method for awarding state electoral votes that may turn interested “safe” states into “battlegrounds.”

The Conclusion briefly summarizes fundamental merits, substantial deficiencies, and certain problems of the currently existing U.S. presidential election system, which have been discussed in the book. Also, it outlines seven major topics relating to presidential elections on which public debates are likely to focus in the years to come: (a) what rules for electing a President and a Vice President are the fairest, (b) how to suppress voter fraud while not suppressing voter turnout; (c) how to improve the Election Day procedures that affect the integrity of the election process; (d) how to broadcast polling results as election campaign develops to avoid “brainwashing” the voters and not to reduce the turnout, (e) what voting technologies can assure the American people that every vote cast is counted, (f) how to improve civics education relating to the election system to make every eligible voter interested in voting in presidential elections, and (g) who should govern the national televised presidential debates, and how these debates should be governed.