Who Elects the President of the United States of America?

Once the nominees have been selected at the convention, they have one last leg of the campaign: the general election. There are two important components to the general election: the popular vote and the Electoral College.
A state's popular vote is the sum of the votes cast by all of the registered voters in a state on Election Day, which is always the first Tuesday in November. The popular vote determines which party's electors will go to the national Electoral College. For example, when Bill Clinton won the popular vote in California in 1996, California's Democratic slate of electors won the right to go to the Electoral College.

Each state is assigned a certain number of electors based on its population. Big states have more electors than small states. Each of these electors has one electoral vote. Even though the electors were part of a slate put together by a certain political party, they are not required to cast their votes for that party's candidate. That makes it possible (although unlikely) for the Electoral College to elect a president who did not win the majority of popular votes.
To win the election, a candidate must get more than half, or over 270, of the electoral votes.
Want to know more?

• Use an Electoral College calculator to see how the system works.
• Check out Electoral College box scores from 1789 to the present.
• Read the Federal Election Commission's explanation of how the Electoral College works or get a short summary of the Electoral College from the Department of State's Web site.
• Become an expert on the Electoral College with this not-so-brief 20-page Brief History of the Electoral College. (Requires the Adobe Acrobat Reader -- click to download.)
• Check out the home page for the U.S. Electoral College.

Educators, try these lesson plans and activities in class!

• PBS's The American President's Electing the President: The American Electoral College System
• These New York Times learning units contain articles, editorials, quizzes, and trivia facts.
• The Smithsonian Institution's Learning About the Presidency
• Education World's The Electoral College
• Education World's Election Results Map
• Education World's The Play's the Thing
• Education World's Reading the Election Results
• Education World's Electoral Versus Popular Vote