The Electoral College is a group of people that elects the President of the U.S and Vice President of the U.S. The Electoral College is made up of 538 electors and it requires a majority of 270 electoral votes to elect a president. Each state chooses electors who vote for a party’s candidate and each state gets a certain number of votes based on its population. So, voters end up electing the electors who elect the president. Each state also has at least three electoral votes because a state’s number of electors is the same number of the Senators and Representatives in that state. The Framers decided to keep the election of the president out of the hands of the voters because they didn’t want the popular vote to determine the election. For example, a popular vote would encourage some big states to change their voting requirements to change the outcome of the election. The point of the Electoral College is to protect the small population states from the big population states. So, the Electoral College makes sure each state has a say in this…show more content… To win the Electoral College vote, the candidates only need to win a state’s electoral votes by one vote. This encourages the candidates to campaign across more swing states. If the candidates campaign in more areas, they’re going to need more campaign money and that means doing more of what their supporters want them to do. But, if the popular vote decided the election, the candidates would only campaign in big population states and small population states like Wyoming and North Dakota wouldn’t matter in the winner-takes-all election. To win the popular vote, the candidates only need to win a majority of the votes. So, the candidates would only focus on trying to win over the bigger population states because those states count for a bigger majority of the
