How Does The United States Electoral College Work

How the Electoral College works is that each state chooses a certain number of people called electors, how many electors the states chose was stated by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 68 "the people of each State shall choose a number of persons as electors, equal to the number of senators and representatives of such State in the national government" (http://thomas.loc.gov/home/histdox/fed_68.html). The number of electors is the same as each states number of electoral votes. Most of the time these electors cast their votes for whichever presidential candidate has won the popular vote in that state, though there have been quite a few times where there has been what is called a faithless elector. This is where at least one of the electors in a state votes for a candidate other than the one who won the popular vote. Some examples of this in presidential elections have been in the 1988 U.S. Presidential Election where a faithless elector in West Virginia cast their vote for the Democratic parties Vice Presidential candidate then Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, another example was in the 1976 U.S. Presidential Election where a faithless elector in the state of Washington cast their vote for Ronald Reagan who had at the time previously served two terms as Governor of California, he would also go on to serve two terms as President of the United States winning landslide victories in the 1980 and 1984 Presidential Elections respectively. A third and final example is in the 1956 U.S. Presidential Election where a faithless elector in Alabama cast their vote for Walter Burgwyn Jones (he was a circuit court judge at the time) instead of the Democratic parties candidate for President Adlai Stevenson II. There have also been numerous other examples of faithless electors in U.S. Presidential Elections. There have been various proposals to change how the electoral college works, some of which I will try and discuss in another blog post.