This article is part of A Kid’s Guide to the Election, a collection of stories about the 2024 presidential election for readers ages 8 to 14, written and produced by The New York Times for Kids. This section is published in The Times’s print edition on the last Sunday of every month.
Every four years, there’s one thing everybody is talking about: the Electoral College. It’s not a school, despite what it sounds like. It’s the unique way that the United States elects its presidents. And if we’re honest, it’s pretty confusing. Here’s a breakdown of how that process works.
When your school elects a class president, the math is simple: The kid who gets the most votes wins. The presidential election is more complicated. When people cast their ballots, their votes won’t go straight to Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. Instead, they go through the Electoral College, a system in which people who represent different states elect the president.
So what is the Electoral College, specifically? It’s a group of hundreds of people called electors who speak for voters in their state. They are usually people involved with politics, like activists or volunteers. You can sort of think of them like team captains who speak for their fellow Pennsylvanians, Coloradans, Wisconsinites and so on. Each state has a different number of electors, and each elector gets one electoral vote.
On Election Day, voters like your mom or dad will cast their ballots in their states. Then state officials tally up all the votes.
Here’s where it gets weird: Whichever candidate wins the most votes in your state will get all your state’s Electoral College votes (except in Maine and Nebraska, where they do things differently). So if a candidate gets even just 51 percent of the votes in New York State, they get all of its 28 electoral votes.
How many votes does each state get? It depends on its population. States where more people live get more: California has the most, with 54, and Texas has the second-most, with 40. The states with the fewest people, like Alaska and Delaware, have only three. If you add up all the electoral votes in all 50 states (plus Washington, D.C.!), it comes to 538 electoral votes total.
The Electoral College means that candidates running for president don’t have to worry about the total number of votes they win across the entire country. They just have to win enough states to add up to 270 electoral votes — which is just over half of 538.
In almost every state, electors are bound by law to vote for the candidate their state picked. That means that once votes are tallied in each state, we’ll know who won. States will then certify the results, and on Dec. 17, the electors will meet to officially cast their votes. On Jan. 6, Congress will count and confirm the results, and the new president will be inaugurated on Jan. 20.
So, uh … why do we do it this way? We have the Electoral College because the men who founded America disagreed over how the new country should elect a president. Some of them thought that only members of Congress should cast the votes. Others thought that everyone in the country should vote for president. And another group worried that states with more people would have too much power in electing the president. So they created the Electoral College as a compromise.
Not everyone thinks this 237-year-old system is fair. Some think it gives voters in a handful of “swing states” too much power. They believe that the person who receives the most votes from all Americans should win. That doesn’t always happen: In 2016, Hillary Clinton received almost three million more votes than Donald Trump but still lost the election, with only 232 electoral votes. Politicians and activists have proposed changing this system, but so far no one has done it. The Electoral College is still how American democracy works — and how the next president will be elected this November.
Ready to follow along? Now that you know the lay of the land, print out this Electoral College map and fill it in on election night.
Instructions: Grab two colored pencils — red for Donald Trump and blue for Kamala Harris. When a candidate wins a state, color it in on the map. Then fill in the same number of squares in the vote counter, column by column. (Note that Maine and Nebraska divide their votes up, so check the news to get those numbers.) The first to cross the centerline, or reach 270 electoral votes, wins.
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