The date for the meeting of the Electoral College is established by federal election law United States Code. Title 3, chapter 1, section 7. In , the designated day for the meeting of the Electoral College is Monday, December This date is set by a federal law enacted in , after the 20th Amendment changed the date for the presidential inauguration from March 4 to January The people have the right, under the U. Constitution, to vote for U. The 17th Amendment ratified in gave the people the right to vote for U.
Senators who were elected by state legislatures under the original Constitution. Instead, the Constitution Article II, section 1, clause 2 provides:.
The Electoral College resulted from this debate. Each state has as many "electors" in the Electoral College as it has Representatives and Senators in the United States Congress, and the District of Columbia has three electors. When voters go to the polls in a Presidential election, they actually vote for the slate of electors who have vowed to cast their ballots for that ticket in the Electoral College. Most states require that all electoral votes go to the candidate who receives the most votes in that state.
After state election officials certify the popular vote of each state, the winning slate of electors meet in the state capital and cast two ballots—one for Vice President and one for President. The founders hoped this rule would prevent the largest states from dominating presidential elections. In the modern era, faithless electors are rarer still, and have never determined the outcome of a presidential election.
House of Representatives About this object In the presidential election, James Garfield narrowly won the popular vote but swept the Electoral College in the Midwest and Northeast. Since the midth century, Congress has met in a Joint Session every four years on January 6 at p.
The sitting Vice President presides over the meeting and opens the votes from each state in alphabetical order. He passes the votes to four tellers—two from the House and two from the Senate—who announce the results.
The clauses of the Constitution under consideration for this essay outline four measures that were designed to promote an independent and responsible executive: the presidential selection system, presidential eligibility, compensation, and the oath of office. The Electoral College established in Article II, Section I remains in effect, although it operates in a substantially different manner from what was originally envisaged.
It is seldom observed that the Electoral College is the fourth national institution created by the Constitution, going along with the Congress, the presidency, and the Court. Its aim was to govern the entirety of the process of selecting the president and vice president, from the initial function of identifying and winnowing the candidates to the final stage of electing these officers except when, for lack of a majority, the decision of choosing the president is given to the House of Representatives and the vice president to the Senate.
The initial function of winnowing the candidates effectively escaped constitutional governance with the formation of political parties in the early nineteenth century.
This task, known now as nomination, is performed by the parties and by state laws and primaries. The Founders had four main objectives for the Electoral College. First, the Electoral College was created to provide the presidency with its own base of support. The plan was the alternative to another method proposed at the Convention, the selection of the president by Congress, which would have risked making the executive subservient to the legislature.
Second, the Founders sought to supply a basis of popular legitimacy for the president. The Electoral College, under which the Electors would be chosen either by the people or the state legislatures, was under the circumstances of the day a quite popular process.
The system, it was thought, would ordinarily hear the public voice. Third, even with this popular input, the Electors were still representatives having the discretion to choose among the most fit of the candidates. The Founders were especially concerned about the dangers involved in the selection of the president, and they counted on the Electors to block the election of a demagogue.
No threat was graver than this to the survival of the constitutional system. Finally, the Electoral College system was meant to channel the energies of the major political figures who had thoughts of achieving the highest office.
The Eligibility Clause establishing the criteria of eligibility for the presidency reflected two concerns. The first is to avoid the possibility of divided loyalty on the part of the president.
As the president is the most important single official of the government and the one with the major responsibility for conducting affairs with foreign nations, a perfect fidelity to the nation, and to no other country, becomes an essential objective. Even the public suspicion of divided loyalty can sap confidence in the presidency. The Founders accordingly required that, in the future, the president must be a natural-born citizen—that is, not an immigrant—and a resident in the United States for fourteen years before being elected—that is, someone who has not moved to live abroad.
Many have questioned this one difference that is created between the status of born and naturalized citizens. The second criterion of eligibility is the age requirement of 35 years, five years greater than that of a senator and 10 years of a member of the House. The higher age for the presidency was meant to increase the likelihood that the president would have acquired experience relevant to governing and, returning to the question of presidential selection, that the public and Electors would have a record for judging the candidates.
In fact, the minimum age seems to have undershot considerably what the American public has preferred. The youngest person to become president was Theodore Roosevelt, who ascended at age 42 to the presidency from the vice-presidency following the death of William McKinley.
John Kennedy was the youngest elected to be president at These two requirements for eligibility are the only ones in the original Constitution and naturally lead one to think of the many possibilities that do not apply: ethnicity, race, gender, religious affiliation explicitly excluded in Article VI, Clause 3 , and property qualifications.
This Clause is also the one that resolved—silently—the question of the number of terms a president can serve. The Founders placed no limits on the length of service. This was changed by the Twenty-Second Amendment , ratified in , which bars eligibility to a person elected to two terms or one term and service as president for more than two years of the term of another person.
Each has done so once: Nebraska in and Maine in The allocations below are based on the Census. They are effective for the , , and presidential elections. Top Skip to main content.
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