The process of the Electoral College is something that is confusing to everyone in America; you walk in to the voting booth on the first Tuesday of November to cast your vote for who you think should be president. You think, as most people do, that your vote will be counted along with the rest of the population, that popular vote will decide the next President of the United States. You do this because you believe it could be the deciding vote for the presidential race. That concept is wrong, your vote only decides who the electors that join the Electoral College in December will be, but the elector can always change his or her vote. Now that you feel your entire life is based on a lie because we have always been taught that the idea of a democracy is where every citizen had his or her say, I will explain the ideology of the Electoral College.
The Framers came up with this system because they did not trust the people of the United States to choose a President and Vice President based on popular vote. Thus, the Electoral College came to be. It was written into the Constitution as a compromise between election of the President by a vote in Congress and election of the President by a popular vote of qualified citizens. The process consists of the selection of the electors, the meeting of the electors where they vote for President and Vice President, and the counting of the electoral votes by Congress. The Electoral College consists of 538 electors. A majority of 270 electoral votes is required to elect the President. Your state’s entitled allotment of electors equals the number of members in its Congressional delegation: one for each member in the House of Representatives plus two for your Senators In a winner take all state; if a candidate receives 51 percent of the vote, he automatically wins the electoral votes for the state. If that state happens to be California, he has won 54 of the 538 possible votes. That is 1/5th of the amount of votes needed to win the presidency. Then if he also appeals to the voters in the other populous states such as Texas, Ohio, Illinois, Florida and New York to get their Electoral votes, he has easily become the next President. These are also the most highly campaigned states because it would be unnecessary to spend to campaign the other states when they have a much