Patric Wallis

During a presidential election the party that won a state, either Democrat or Republican (independent voting is also an option), is largely represented by blue and red respectively.

Every 4 years, a general election takes place to elect our nation’s president and vice president.

To win the presidency, a candidate must accumulate 270 of the 538 electoral college votes, but where do these “electoral college votes” come from? What even is the Electoral College?

For one, the “electoral college” is not a place but a system used to determine who wins a presidential election. This system has three major steps:

1. Selection of the electors – Political parties for each state select a slate of potential electors before the election. Then during the election, the voters for each state select the slate of electors with their votes. Example – Democrats and Republicans create their slate of electors before the election and a majority of Colorado voters vote for the Democratic Party candidate, which results in the Democratic elector slate being selected.

2. Meeting of the electors – The chosen slate of electors meet in their state and then vote for who they think should be president. For example – The chosen slate, in this case, the Democratic slate, would most likely vote for the Democratic candidate.

3. Counting of electoral votes – The first two steps are repeated with every single state and each state (the elector slate) determines whether to cast their vote for the Democratic or Republican Party. Note that there are candidates who don’t group themselves with either of the two major parties, but the Democrat and Republican parties get the most attention. The electoral votes for that state now go towards the candidate the elector slate voted for. Example – The democratic elector slates votes for the Democratic candidate which results in Colorado’s votes, as a whole, going toward this candidate. Colorado would then be represented as a blue state just like in the map above.

For a more in-depth look at this process, you can look here.

Almost every single state is a “winner takes all” situation. Even if the Democratic Party won by a small margin all of Colorado’s electoral votes would go towards the democratic nominee. Two states, Maine and Nebraska, follow a different method where it’s possible to split the electoral vote. If the republican candidate wins the popular vote in most of the state’s districts but the democratic candidate wins some of the districts, then the republican candidate would receive the majority of the votes, and the democratic candidate would get the minority.

For more information on these two state’s processes in particular, you can look here.

Each state has a certain amount of electoral votes. The number of votes granted to each state is determined by its population according to the census; a process that happens every 10 years that tracks the population numbers of the states. The census also determines how many representatives and senators your state is eligible to have, which is important because “every state is allocated a number of votes equal to the number of Senators and Representatives.”

There are only a total of 583 electoral votes that are allocated between the states, so when a state gains a vote it has to come from another state. Example – Multiple states lost an electoral vote in the 2020 census: California, Michigan, New York, and more. This gives room for other states to be allocated more electoral votes due to an increase in their population.

State’s populations can fluctuate greatly, or not much, during the 10 years since the last census so electoral college votes change to represent those population changes. Example – Colorado gained one electoral vote in the 2020 census due to its population increasing. Now Colorado has eight electoral votes instead of seven.

In essence, you’re not really voting for the president but rather for a slate of electors that will end up voting for the president themselves. The Electoral College can be a complicated concept to understand but it’s worth the research to learn about as it’s a crucial part of our government.