- To find out how much Americans know about their own government, we decided there was no better time than to hit the streets of the National Mall on the first significant snowfall that Washington D.C. has seen in years.

What is the electoral college?

- It's how we vote in America.

- Their job is to collect all the votes from the 50 states.

- It's well, it's some, it's... - And it's like a group of people that basically have like the final decision.

- If Billy Bob gets 200 votes and his brother doesn't get but 100, then Billy Bob gets the number of votes that that state has for electoral votes.

- I'm pretty sure it is added up by the representatives, the House seats.

Well, the House seats and then the Senate seats too, right?

Or...?

- You know what?

I dunno.

- Look, it's confusing, but I'm gonna tell you everything you need to know about the electoral college.

I'm Ben Sheehan and this is "Civics Made Easy."

To start, how does the electoral college work today?

Step one, each political party in your state picks its slate of electors, people who pledge to vote for whoever wins their state.

Usually people in state government, party officials, even donors, and anyone can technically be an elector as long as you aren't in Congress or the executive branch and you haven't engaged in insurrection, rebellion or treason, which as of now makes most of us eligible, but the day is young.

As for the number of electors each state gets, it's equal to its total members of Congress.

So because Iowa has two senators and four members of the House, it gets six electors.

So each political party in Iowa picks its six electors and they wait.

Step two, election day.

Whichever candidate wins your state, their party's electors become your state's electors.

Step three, those electors meet in your state capitol on the first Tuesday after the second Wednesday in December, a normal way to describe time, and each casts one vote for president and one for vice president.

After that, someone in your state, usually the governor or the secretary of state, certifies the electoral votes and sends them to the vice president in Washington D.C.

Step four, on January 6th at one o'clock Eastern, the vice president opens and counts the electoral votes in front of the newly-elected Congress.

Whoever gets a majority, that's at least 270 out of 538 electoral votes, becomes the president and the same goes for the vice president.

What happens if there's a tie in the electoral college?

- Ooh, then that's a funny situation.

The vice president casts the tie-breaking vote.

- I guess they restart, I think?

- I don't know what happens if it's a tie.

I would guess that they bring in somebody else.

- If no one gets a majority of electoral votes, like a 269 to 269 tie, then the House picks the president and the Senate picks the vice president.

The House votes by state where you need 26 out of 50 to win, and the Senate votes by Senator where you need 51 out of 100.

By the way, the authors of the Constitution thought the House would end up choosing the president almost every time.

Turns out that's happened twice, in 1800 with Thomas Jefferson, and in 1824 with John Quincy Adams.

And the Senate has only picked the Vice President once in 1836 with Richard Johnson.

And finally, step five, after the winners are announced, the new president and new vice president are sworn in on January 20th at noon Eastern.

And as soon as that happens, their terms begin.

To better understand what this process actually looks like, we're meeting with Colleen Shogan, the former archivist of the United States, who is responsible for looking after both the certificates of the electors and their electoral votes in the 2024 election.

Can I hold the Constitution and how often do people ask you that?

- Unfortunately, not even I am allowed to hold the Constitution of the United States.

- So we're filming this and just a couple days ago, the process of certification of the electoral votes actually happened, and that's sort of a drawn out process over a few weeks or months.

Can you kind of walk us through that process?

- We receive two sets of certificates.

One is a certificate of the electors, and then we receive another set of certificates which actually outline the votes from that state, the electoral college votes for the state.

- A few days later, you bring them to Congress for them to be counted, you bring them to the vice president.

How does the transfer work?

- We actually, those are our copies that we keep here at the National Archives, but there's separate copies that are sent to Congress for counting.

- Dr. Shogan, what do electoral votes actually look like?

- The states actually keep the votes, the actual electoral votes that the electors cast.

But we have the certificates of votes, which tells the vote tally for every individual state and they're very formal looking documents.

You can look at them online at archives.gov.

We have all of them available if you'd like to take a look.

- I would, and I'd also like to know who you think has the best looking certificate.

- I don't, I would not be- I'm sorry, I'm not able to state that.

- This brings us to why do we have the electoral college?

To start, we're going back to '87.

1787.

At the Constitutional Convention seen in this public domain painting, the delegates spent 21 days arguing over how to pick the president, but could not agree.

So just before they all left Philadelphia, a few delegates suggested the electoral college, not a school, just a group of people.

And this electoral college combined three ideas that had been proposed to try to please everyone.

And speaking of pleasing everyone, because this next part is dense, while I explain, I'm gonna hold this puppy.

The first idea was Congress would pick the president, but some delegates thought states with more Congress people would have too much say or that Congress could corrupt the president.

So the compromise was electors, a group of people whose only job is to vote for president would choose instead.

And if no candidate got more than half of those electoral votes, the House would pick, as in Congress.

I think he needs to go outside.

The second idea was that state legislatures would pick.

These are people who write your state's laws.

And the final idea was a national popular vote.

So how did we get from this combination of rejected ideas to what we have now?

The Election of 1824.

Imagine a candidate getting the most popular votes and the most electoral votes and losing.

Well, you don't have to 'cause that's what happened to Andrew Jackson.

In 1824, he got the most electoral votes, but not a majority.

And when no one gets a majority, the House chooses the president and they went with John Quincy Adams.

Jackson was not pleased, so he did something.

Before he ran again four years later, Jackson persuaded a bunch of states to change their approach to the electoral college.

Instead of politicians choosing the electors, voters would cast ballots for president.

Whichever candidate wins, their political party's electors will vote for that candidate when the electoral college meets.

In other words, we, the people, suddenly had way more power to choose the president.

As a result, Jackson won that election and his reelection by a landslide.

You now know why we have the electoral college and how it works.

And like everything else in government, some people like it and others really don't.

- I think it's unfair.

- I'm indifferent upon it.

- Our forefathers put this in place a long time ago and it worked then, and I think it can work now.

- Those who like the electoral college say it forces candidates to appeal to different voters in a variety of states.

And if the presidency were a popular vote, it would just shift the voting power to the biggest cities.

Electoral college stands also say it makes it harder to hack our elections because it's a decentralized system with multiple stages of voting and vote counting.

And for less populous states, it gives them a seat at the table.

Because each state gets at least three electoral votes regardless of its size, that means your vote for president can have different power depending on your state.

For example, Wyoming has one electoral vote for every 195,000 people, while Texas has one for every 760,000 people.

It's also true that swing states benefit from the electoral college.

In the 2020 election, 96% of campaign spending was on the 12 most competitive states on hotels, restaurants, transportation, and, of course, TV ads.

And if we had a national popular vote, that money would likely go again to the largest cities.

But those who don't like the electoral college point out that with a national popular vote, your vote has the same weight no matter which state you're in.

They also note that in many states, the electors don't have to vote how their state votes.

Of course, the odds of electors who are party loyalists voting differently are slim, but it has happened.

In 2016, there were 10 faithless electors who didn't vote for the winner of their state, the most ever besides 1872.

And while it's never changed the outcome of an election, in a close one, it could.

And lastly, electoral college skeptics point out that, thanks to this system, the person who got the most popular votes has lost the election five times.

Andrew Jackson in 1824, Samuel Tilden in 1876, Grover Cleveland in 1888, Al Gore in 2000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016.

This is all to say that if you like the electoral college, you're in luck, it's what we have.

But if you don't, and according to Pew Research, that's two out of three Americans, there are really four ways to change it.

One is a constitutional amendment.

There have been more than 700 introduced in Congress to abolish the electoral college, but obviously none prevailed.

A second way is by increasing the number of representatives in the House.

Since 1929, the number has been capped at 435, but increasing the amount of representatives would increase the number of electoral votes, and it would create slightly less of an imbalance between someone's vote for president in one state versus another.

A third is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which just rolls off the tongue.

It's an agreement where states promise to give their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, not the winner of their state.

As of this taping, 17 states and D.C. have signed it with a total of 209 electoral votes between them.

And lastly, any state could undo the work of Andrew Jackson and award its electoral votes proportionally instead of winner-take-all.

Today, 48 states and D.C. give all their electoral votes to the winner of the state.

But if states went proportional, that would make the electoral vote more closely match the popular vote.

Two states kind of do this, Maine and Nebraska, where the winner of the state gets two electoral votes and the winner of each congressional district gets one.

But there's one more thing you should know about the electoral college.

At the Constitutional Convention, part of why it took so long to figure out how to pick the president was slavery.

You see, slave states didn't want a popular vote because they had fewer voters and enslaved people couldn't vote, but the electoral college addressed this.

See, in the census, we used to count an enslaved person as 3/5 of a person.

That means slave states got additional members of the House and thus additional electoral votes just for having enslaved people.

This was one of the many compromises to get slave states to sign the Constitution.

Early on, Virginia and Pennsylvania had about the same number of free people.

But thanks to Virginia's huge enslaved population, it got six extra electoral votes, which is probably why four of our first five presidents were slave owners from Virginia.

So with that in mind, what do you think?

Should we keep the electoral college as is, change it or get rid of it entirely?

Comment below with your thoughts, and I hope you learned something.

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I promise there are no stupid questions.