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The video explains the Electoral College, the group of electors that formally chooses the US president, and why it can let a candidate win the presidency without winning the national popular vote. It traces the system to 1787 compromises, explains winner-take-all rules and how small states get outsized weight, and concludes that the system works roughly as the Founders intended, leaving open whether it serves voters today. It also covers reform options like the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact and the 2022 Electoral Count Reform Act.
- The Electoral College was created at the 1787 Constitutional Convention as a compromise between letting citizens elect the president directly and letting Congress or governors choose.
- Each state's electors equal its senators (always two) plus its House representatives, which depends on population.
- Most states use winner-take-all, so the popular vote winner in a state gets all its electoral votes; Maine and Nebraska split theirs by congressional district.
- Because of how seats are allocated, a Wyoming voter has roughly four times the Electoral College influence of a California voter, per the video's numbers.
- Five US presidential elections have been won by the candidate with fewer total votes, including 2000 (Bush) and 2016 (Trump, who trailed Clinton by about 2.9 million votes).
- Faithless electors occasionally vote against their pledge, and in 2020 the Supreme Court allowed states to punish them with fines or by invalidating their ballots.
- Defenders argue the system protects rural and smaller states from being ignored, while critics point to its unequal weighting and winner-take-all effects.
- The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact has 18 states plus DC signed on but would only take effect if states totaling 270 electoral votes join; the 2022 Electoral Count Reform Act made the Vice President's role in counting votes purely ceremonial after the January 6 attack.
- 0:00Popular Vote Versus Electoral Win
- 0:56What the Electoral College Is
- 1:38The 1787 Constitutional Compromise
- 3:31How Electors Are Chosen Today
- 5:04Faithless Electors and Counting
- 6:25Why Small States Count More
- 7:13Winner-Take-All and Battlegrounds
- 10:06Defending the Electoral College
- 10:47Reform Proposals and Compact
- 12:08January 6 and the 2022 Reform
- 13:22Is the System Broken?
Popular Vote Versus Electoral Win
0:00In the year 2000, George W. Bush won the presidency, even though over half a million fewer people voted for him than for Al Gore. The same thing happened in 2016, when Donald Trump won, even though 2.9 million fewer people voted for him than for Hillary Clinton. In fact, in five different presidential elections in US history, the winner of the most votes lost the election as a whole.
0:25It sounds like upside down maths, but it's actually caused by something that goes all the way back to the Constitution, [music] the Electoral College. So, what's the deal? Is the Electoral College broken? Or could it be that it's actually working exactly [music] how the Founding Fathers intended it to?
0:45Hi, I'm Kusha Navdar. This is CrashCourse and we're answering big questions on US government.
What the Electoral College Is
0:56We love to debate about the Electoral College, but what actually is it in the first place? In simplest terms, the Electoral College is the group of people who actually cast their votes for president. They represent the will of their given state's voters. And while the US isn't the only country where people elect their leader indirectly, no one else does it quite like us.
1:14And the Electoral College isn't a recent invention. Let's check in with Buff, our resident historian, who's almost as handsome as me, for how this started. >> Hi Kusha. You're glowing. All right, let's let's get into it and stop history from being a mystery. So, the year was 1787. The drafters were writing the Constitution, and they found themselves with a pretty heavy question.
The 1787 Constitutional Compromise
1:40How do you pick a president fairly? They agreed citizens should have a say, citizens at the time of course meaning white land-owning men, but running a national election by popular vote, where the people directly decide the winner, sounded like a logistical nightmare, even with only 13 states at the time.
2:01Another concern among the Southern states was their large population of enslaved people. While the populations between the Northern and Southern states were roughly equal, around a third of the Southern population were enslaved and thus non-voting, giving the South less power under a popular vote system.
2:23Another idea was to give Congress members or governors the task of picking the [music] president, but some worried that would give the legislative branch too much power and pave the way for an election process more secretive and cutthroat than a tribal council meeting on Survivor. So, somewhere between everybody chooses the president and only elected leaders do, the founders struck a last-minute compromise.
2:46Each state gets a slate of electors based on how many senators they've got, which is always two, and how many representatives in the House they've got, which varies depending on the state's population. Then, those electors actually cast votes for the next president. And thus, the Electoral College was born.
3:08Back to you, Kusha. Wow, Buff, I had no idea you like Survivor. You know, Jeff Probst is like a founding father of reality TV. Okay, back to business. The Constitution doesn't actually dictate how states pick electors, but it lays down some ground rules, like electors can't be current members of Congress.
3:26But electors also aren't just randos off the street. Today, what generally happens is each party picks their slate of electors at their state's conventions. Typically, they're local leaders or campaign ride or dies with deep party loyalties. Then, when regular people like you and me vote, we're not actually voting for our favorite presidential candidate.
How Electors Are Chosen Today
3:50We're voting for the slate of electors who've pledged to vote for that candidate. Oh, thanks. Most states, plus Washington, D.C., go for a system that's winner takes all, where the party that wins the popular vote gets all the electors, too. Take Colorado. In 2024, 54% of regular voters cast their ballots for Kamala Harris.
4:1743% voted for Trump. Since Harris won the popular vote, she got all 10 of Colorado's electoral votes. But two states, Maine and Nebraska, do things a little differently. They give two of their electoral votes to whoever wins the popular vote in their state overall, and the rest to the favorite in each individual congressional district.
4:41Nationwide, there are 538 total electoral votes up for grabs, and a candidate needs a majority of those to win, 270, to be exact. But when it's election night and you're watching the news on your phone and and those [music] fancy state maps on your screen light up red and blue, they're really projecting what the electoral vote will be.
5:00The real electoral vote happens after election day, on the Tuesday following the second Wednesday of December. And it's only officially done on January 6th when the electoral votes get counted in Congress under the Vice President's eye. And most of the time, that's how the Electoral College works. But rarely a faithless elector rocks the boat and votes for someone other than who they pledged to.
Faithless Electors and Counting
5:25It happened in 2016 when seven members of the Electoral College voted against their pledge, causing Trump to lose two electoral votes and Clinton to lose five. And actually, there's nothing in the Constitution that says faithless electors can't be faithless. But after all the drama in 2016, the Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that states are allowed to punish their own faithless electors with fines or by invalidating their ballots.
5:53It's all pretty complex, but the main reason people grumble about the Electoral College is that oddity I mentioned before. It makes it completely possible for a candidate to win the popular vote, but still lose the election. There's a few reasons why this happens. The first being that a citizen's vote in a smaller state actually counts more than in a big one.
6:15That sounds like even more fake math, but remember, the number of electors for each state is calculated by how many seats in Congress it has. And while the number of house seats is calculated based on population, every state gets two electoral votes for the Senate no matter how many people live there.
Why Small States Count More
6:33I'll give you an example. Wyoming, a low-population state, gets three total electors for their two senators and one house rep. That breaks down to about one elector for every 200,000 people. Meanwhile, California, with a famously massive population, gets 54 electors total, about one elector for every 700,000 people.
6:59That means a voter in Wyoming has almost four times more influence on the Electoral College than a voter in California. But there's a second reason there's sometimes a difference between who wins the popular vote and the electoral vote. It's that winner-takes-all thing that most states have going on.
Winner-Take-All and Battlegrounds
7:17Again, looking at California is helpful here. Harris won the state in 2024, taking home all 54 electoral votes, but only 58% of Californian voters actually cast their ballots for her. That's how winner-takes-all works, though. Even if she'd only won California by a single popular vote, she still would have swept all 54 of the state's electoral votes.
7:42That means millions of popular votes essentially have no influence on the outcome of the actual election. In 2024, Trump won millions of votes in blue states that did nothing to help clinch his win. Just like Harris earned millions of votes in red states that made no difference in preventing her defeat.
8:01In fact, about the same number of people voted for Trump in California alone as in 12 of the lower population states that actually won him electoral votes. This puts a lot of pressure on states where the popular vote comes really close. Battleground states have a decent shot of swinging one way or the other, and all it takes is a small cadre of folks to change their mind.
8:28If that happens in enough battleground states, a candidate can get a motherlode of electoral votes even if they only won a baby full? More popular votes in those states, which is why we hear about Wisconsin a lot every four years. I mean, that and their cheese curds. I'm lactose intolerant. That's exactly what happened in 2016.
8:52You You look at the electoral map and it looks like Trump won by a landslide, 306 to 232. But if less than 100,000 voters total across Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin had voted for Clinton instead, she would have taken those electoral votes and won 278 to 260. In the end, Clinton came out with nearly 3 million more popular votes nationwide than Trump.
9:22But because of the Electoral College, it was Trump who was elected president. That disconnect between the popular vote and electoral vote can be enough to make you wonder, uh are we really just down to live like this? Some argue it's actually not such a bad thing for the Electoral College and the popular vote to get out of sync sometimes for reasons not so different from the one put forth in 1787.
9:46What about the little guys? Defenders of the Electoral College argue that if elections were decided by popular vote alone, candidates would naturally focus on the most densely populated states and that would leave [music] rural areas and their specific important needs behind. I feel like the candidates would still hit up the Iowa State Fair for the butter cow alone, but maybe that's just me.
Defending the Electoral College
10:12I'm still lactose intolerant. But while that's a super valid concern, the math doesn't actually math. Even if candidates put all their energy into winning over voters in the 100 biggest cities and they got all of the popular votes there, they'd still only have 26% of the popular vote total. You literally couldn't win without paying attention to the little guys and the medium-sized guys, too.
10:36Still, it's one thing to be like, "Hey, maybe this system isn't really serving us well." It is another to fix it. To actually do away with the Electoral College, we'd need to pass a constitutional amendment. And that is legitimately like a 535-person tribal council except even more fighting. The workaround that's made the most headway so far is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
Reform Proposals and Compact
10:59That's an agreement between states to automatically give all their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. So, if you lose Colorado but win the popular vote overall, you still get all of Colorado's electoral votes. This wouldn't get rid of the Electoral College, but it would essentially defang it.
11:19So far, 18 states and Washington D.C. have agreed to the compact, but the compact only goes into effect if enough states get on board for the total electoral votes to add up to 270. But, it's a little dubious how constitutional the NPVIC actually is, and there aren't signs of enough other states planning to join anytime soon.
11:43Since the Electoral College seems here to stay, at least for now, there are bipartisan efforts to help prevent it from being used for any funny business. Like the 2022 Electoral Count Reform Act, or ECRA, was created in response to the attack on the US [music] Capitol on January 6th, 2021. January 6th, if you remember, is the day when electors' votes [music] are formally tallied while observed by the sitting Vice President.
January 6 and the 2022 Reform
12:10After losing both the popular vote and [music] the Electoral College in 2020, outgoing President Trump and a group of supporters moved to create an alternate slate of [music] Republican electors in certain battleground states he lost, so Trump [music] would be declared the winner. The plan was to get Vice President Mike Pence to count [music] those votes instead of the official ones, which resulted in an armed riot at the [music] Capitol.
12:39Spoiler alert, the plan failed. But, it was a wake-up call for lots of people who wanted to make sure that, while imperfect, the Electoral College couldn't be used to overthrow the results of an election. Now, the ECRA clarifies the Vice President's role in counting the votes as purely ceremonial. So, even if the rioters had succeeded in wrestling their new electors in after the fact, Trump still would have lost the presidency.
13:03Whenever we think about how our government works, or doesn't, we have to think about where it came from. A bunch of land-owning white guys locked in a hot, swampy conference room over 200 years ago. >> [music] >> These guys created the Electoral College to solve what they saw as a problem. That maybe it wasn't such a great idea to give all the power to all the people, logistically [music] or politically.
Is the System Broken?
13:29So, is the Electoral College broken? Well, actually no. It's [music] working more or less exactly as the founders intended it to. The question is, is it working for us here, today, now, for [music] you and me? And if it's not, what might we build instead? And next time, we'll keep thinking about the idea of one person, one vote.
13:46We're talking voter fraud, people. I'll see you then. This episode of Crash Course Big Questions on US Government was produced in partnership with USAFacts, a non-partisan civic tech project [music] that makes government data easier to understand. For more resources that go along with these videos, go to [music] usafacts.org/crashcourse.
14:06Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Big Questions on US Government, which was filmed in Indianapolis, Indiana, and was made with the help of all these nice people. If you want to help keep Crash Course [music] free for everyone forever, you can join our community on Patreon. >> [bell]
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