The following is a guest post by Barbara Bavis and Robert Brammer, both legal reference librarians in the Public Services Division of the Law Library of Congress.
The 2012 Presidential election is projected to be close, and attention has turned to whether the Electoral College may diverge from the popular vote in shaping the outcome of an election. Should this come to pass, we will once again have a national debate as to whether the Electoral College should be maintained, scrapped, or amended. But what exactly is the Electoral College system and who established it?
The concept of the “Electoral College”—although not specifically mentioned by name—appears in Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution, representing the Founding Fathers’ effort to create a mechanism by which the states select the President and Vice President of the United States. Section 1 creates a select group of representatives known as “electors,” determined by state. The number of electoral votes awarded to each state is dependent upon the number of Senators and Representatives that state possesses. For example, California has two Senators and fifty-three Representatives, so the state has fifty-five electoral votes. The 23rd Amendment