The US Electoral College - What is it, and why will it decide the 2024 presidential election?

Explainer - It's a little under a month until the US presidential election, and if you've been paying attention, you'll be hearing an awful lot about the Electoral College. But what exactly is it? RNZ is here with what you need to know.

The Electoral College is the key to determining who will be the next US President after the 5 November election - Republican former President Donald Trump or Democrat Vice-President Kamala Harris.

What is the Electoral College?

When Americans cast votes for Harris or Trump or other presidential candidates, they're also actually voting for 538 electors who, in a system laid out by the US Constitution, comprise the Electoral College - which is actually a process, not a place. Those electors cast their votes for president based on how their state's population votes and the result is then certified by the US Congress before the president is sworn in.

The big number to keep in mind - 270. That's how many electoral votes the winning candidate needs.

There's an elector for every one of a state's legislators in the US House of Representatives and the US Senate - 435 in the House, which is allocated by state populations, and 100 in the Senate, which is not. Plus, there's three electors for the District of Columbia (not a state) where the US capital Washington DC is. Electors cannot be members of Congress.

So a state like California, with 52 congressional representatives and two senators, gets 54 electoral votes, while somewhere like sparsely populated Wyoming only has one congressional representative and two senators and gets three electoral votes.

Theoretically, there could be a tie in the Electoral College of 269 votes each which means the election gets thrown to the House of Representatives to vote on, but this hasn't happened since 1800.

Because almost every state has a "winner take all" system for electoral votes, a candidate can get more actual votes (the 'popular' vote) and still lose the Electoral College.

Does the popular vote even matter, then?

Until the year 2000, it was pretty rare to see the victor win the Electoral College but come second in the popular vote - the last time before that was in 1888!

But in 2000, Al Gore narrowly beat George W Bush in the popular vote 48.4 to 47.9 percent, yet lost in the Electoral College after a controversial Supreme Court decision on the Florida vote. And in 2016, Democrat Hillary Clinton actually won the popular vote by close to 3 million votes, 48.2 to 46.2 percent, but Donald Trump won the Electoral College 306 to 232.

If Trump wins several "swing states," a similar split could happen in 2024 with Harris capturing the popular vote but losing the election.

Scott Althaus is a professor of political science and communication at the University of Illinois and a co-author of the recent Oxford University Press book Battleground: Electoral College Strategies, Execution and Impact in the Modern Era.

"We're in a period where winners have small margins of victory in Electoral College votes, and that allows for divergences between popular vote winners and Electoral College winners," Althaus told RNZ.

"When this happens, it is extremely confusing to ordinary Americans because mostly we think of ourselves as casting votes directly for presidential candidates, rather than for the electors who will themselves be voting for the candidates."

What are 'swing states'?

You may notice that you're not hearing a lot about Donald Trump campaigning in California or Kamala Harris in Alabama. That's because in most recent presidential elections, the "red" (Republican-leaning) and "blue" (Democrat-leaning) states have been pretty set in stone. But some states are what might be called "purple".

The seven swing states this year are considered to be Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Georgia and Michigan.

Each one of them has gone between Republican and Democrat presidential candidates in recent years and it can often be very close - Joe Biden won Georgia by just 13,000 votes in 2020 in a state with 11 million people. A huge proportion of campaign resources, advertising and visits go to those few swinging states.

While maps that show a sea of Republican red when considering electoral votes make it look like America is majority Republican, many of those geographically large states like Montana and South Dakota have low populations and so only have a few electoral votes.

So, it's winner take all?

Mostly, yes. If a candidate won just 50.1 percent of the vote in Pennsylvania, they still get all 19 of its electoral votes. Pennsylvania is the biggest of the swing states so that's why you're going to keep seeing its name over and over until the election.

Only two, less populated states have a somewhat different system - Nebraska and Maine, where there is a semi-proportional allocation based on results in congressional districts. Republicans recently tried to get Nebraska to change its system this year because the Democrats might win the single electoral vote for the Omaha area, but the effort failed.

The system could change - but hang on, we're still getting to that.

Why is there an Electoral College in the first place?

The Electoral College dates all the way back to when the US Constitution was written in the 1780s. Article II of the Constitution says that appointed electors will choose the president.

It's all a throwback to a time when the country was new and spread out and there was "uncertainty about how much responsibility individual voters should have in exercising accountability over the federal system," Althaus said.

"When the US Constitution was ratified in 1787, there was no other example or model to point to for figuring out how to make a large democracy work given the size of the new nation and the limited means of travel and communication across such a large geographical area," he said.

The original emphasis was that legislative representatives would have far more power in choosing the makeup of the government. US Senators were chosen by state legislatures, not voters, until 1913, for instance.

Althaus noted, "the Electoral College system of indirect representation in the selection of presidents rather than by direct popular vote is one of the last remaining vestiges of the original system".

The Constitution and set-up of the Electoral College was also mired in the racism of the time when a compromise decided that enslaved Black Americans would count as "three-fifths" of a human being when it came to establishing state representation in government.

Is the Electoral College fair?

"Most parts of the original rationale for the Electoral College are no longer aligned with the way we practice democracy in 2024 America," Althaus said.

One of the reasons behind the Electoral College was "the original desire that larger states shouldn't dominate the federal government at the expense of smaller states".

Because every state gets at least three electoral votes and has two senators, this means somewhere like Wyoming with only 580,000 people gets a proportionally larger voice in government than California with more than 39 million people.

"There is a slight Republican advantage in the Electoral College system relative to the national popular vote stemming from the disproportionate weighting smaller states have in the Electoral College because they get two US Senators regardless of how small their population is," Althaus said.

"This is not a 'forever advantage' because the partisan leanings of individual states do change over time, but in the present moment this provides a slight Republican advantage within the Electoral College that would only matter in an extremely close race."

What happened in 2020 and could it happen again?

The Electoral College cast their votes in December and send the results to Congress. Congress then meets in early January to count those votes and certify the election winner before inauguration day on 20 January.

Many Americans are concerned about how electors could potentially be manipulated or swayed. A number of so-called "faithless electors" voted for different candidates in 2016, which resulted in a US Supreme Court verdict allowing a crackdown on such behaviours.

Trump has been indicted for his alleged participation in a plan to create alternate "fake electors" after he lost the 2020 election.

On 6 January 2021, Trump supporters rioted in Washington DC over the certification of Biden's victory by Congress - which until then had been a routine procedural task for more than 200 years.

Congress passed the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 to attempt to clarify the process and head off a repeat of 6 January this year.

Still, Althaus notes "there is still much uncertainty and confusion regarding how things will proceed" after the vote, with Trump continuing to deny he lost the 2020 election.

Will America ever change its system?

The Electoral College is pretty unpopular, with 63 percent of Americans saying they want a change in a recent Pew Research poll.

Like many things in a country as big as America, change is often slow, yet Althaus predicts "eventually" something may happen - but don't hold your breath.

"Changing the basic structure and logic of the Electoral College would require passing a constitutional amendment, and it's exceedingly unlikely for that to happen so long as one side perceives an advantage in maintaining the status quo."

There are possible routes to alter the system without amending the US Constitution.

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is an agreement that the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia wins the presidency. If enough states to equal 270 electoral votes agreed to it, it would come into force.

It was introduced in 2006 and so far, 17 states have approved it, totalling a bit over 200 votes. It's unclear if the compact would face legal challenges, though.

Another option would be increasing the size of the House of Representatives from 435 to reflect the population which could dilute state-specific electoral votes, Althaus said.

"It is important to keep in mind that there would be different partisan biases in play if the US switched to the national popular vote for electing presidents, so no system for electing candidates is free of biases."

Whatever happens, the messy and complicated process of American presidential politics and the current sharp divides will not be washed away overnight.