Tell Your Story: The Electoral College

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Inauguration Day has also been, over the years, the occasion for plenty else, from weather problems and missing Bibles to do-overs and not a few live animals. There were even some dead ones, too.

So much of this election feels so entirely off the map — "unprecedented," as it is called in one story after another. So we wondered just how unprecedented it is. A few Nexis searches later, the answer is: very.

If the candidates tie, aor if no one reached the magic 270, the election would be thrown to the House of Representatives, where each state delegation gets one vote.

After the grueling 36-day Florida recount battle, Al Gore finally conceded the presidency to George W. Bush on December 13, 2000. But the controversy surrounding this unprecedented election and its aftermath did not end there.

For the fifth time in U.S. history, and the second time this century, a presidential candidate has won the White House while losing the popular vote.

There had been a total of 157 faithless electors until the 2016 presidential election, with that number growing to 164.

In modern practice, the Electoral College is mostly a formality. Most electors are loyal members of the party that has selected them, and in 26 states, plus Washington, D.C., electors are bound by laws or party pledges to vote in accord with the popular vote. 

In the United States Presidential election of 1864, Abraham Lincoln was re-elected as president.

There are a total of 538 electors in the Electoral College. Candidates need 270 votes to win the presidency.

Maine and Nebraska both use an alternative method of distributing their electoral votes, called the Congressional District Method. Currently, these two states are the only two in the union that diverge from the traditional winner-take-all method of electoral vote allocation.

1824 saw the first election in which the majority of states used a statewide winner-take-all voting method for choosing their presidential electors.

Electoral votes are allocated among the states based on the Census. Every state is allocated a number of votes equal to the number of senators and representatives in its U.S. Congressional delegation—two votes for its senators in the U.S. Senate plus a number of votes equal to the number of its members in the U. S. House of Representatives.

 By voting for a Republican presidential candidate, for example, you are really voting for a member of the Electoral College who is expected -- but not required -- to vote along party lines, too.

If you want to become an elector, know the process is more complex than just a random draw.

The Electoral College is embodied in the Constitution in Article 2, Section 1, and in the 12th Amendment.

When Americans vote for a President and Vice President, they are actually voting for presidential electors, known collectively as the electoral college. It is these electors, chosen by the people, who elect the chief executive.

Federal law in the United States since the 1840s has required that the presidential election be held every four years on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. In modern society, that seems like an arbitrary time to hold an election. Yet that specific placement on the calendar made a lot of sense in the 1800s.