History of the Electoral College 

The Electoral College was established in 1787 through the U.S. Constitution to provide equal balance between large and small states during the presidential election. During the Constitutional Convention, the Founding Fathers discussed the most appropriate way of selecting a president. The bargain they settled on was a system where electors, not the public or Congress, would elect the president. The number of electors from each state equates to the number of representatives the state had in Congress and the legislatures of the states initially elected electors. Most states at the time used the popular election of electors. The 12th Amendment of 1804 changed that process to have electors vote separate ballots for president and vice-president to avoid deadlock, such as the Aaron Burr and Thomas Jefferson Election in 1800 (National Constitution Center).

The Electoral College changed in the 19th and 20th centuries. The majority of states had implemented winner-takes-all policies by the mid-1800s, where the candidate who won the most votes in a state (no matter how small the margin was) received all the electoral votes, except for Maine and Nebraska, which both had a proportional system (National Archives, 2020). Over the years, the Electoral College system has been seen as controversial because it has been argued that it overlooks the democratic principle of "one person, one vote," especially after several presidential elections where a candidate received the majority popular vote but lost the presidency. Two of the most recent examples are the 2000 election when George W. Bush was elected president despite losing the popular vote to Al Gore by a difference of over 500,000 votes, and the 2016 election, when Donald Trump was elected president via Electoral College despite losing the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes (Foley, 2017). These results generated more calls for reform, like the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an effort in which states pledge to vote their electors based on the national popular vote rather than the state's vote (National Popular Vote, 2021). Despite the various debates about the Electoral College, it remains an integral part of American democracy and continues to shape the dynamics of presidential election and balancing power among states.