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| Electoral Map of the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election |
The Electoral College is basically how the United States of America elects their President every four years. Each of the fifty states and the capital Washington D.C. is assigned a number of electoral votes and in most of these states during the election the Presidential candidate who wins the popular vote in that state wins all of the electoral votes in that state. The exception to this is in the states of Maine and Nebraska, in these states the candidate who wins the states popular vote gets two electoral votes and then the winning candidate of each of the states congressional district gets one electoral vote. Each state assigns a number of electors who have one vote for President and another for the Vice President, sometimes these electors go against the rest and vote for the candidate who did not win the states popular vote they are called faithless electors. Some examples of this are in the 1988 Presidential election the Democratic parties Vice Presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen (1921-2006) received one electoral vote from a faithless elector in West Virginia, another example is in the 1912 Presidential election where former President Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) won two electoral votes in California from two faithless electors.
With the Electoral College system a Presidential candidate needs to win a minimum of 270 out 538 electoral votes to win the election. This can still happen despite the fact that the candidate may not have won the nation wide popular vote as was the case when in the 2000 Presidential election when then governor of Texas George W. Bush got 47.9% of the popular vote where as the current Vice President at the time Al Gore got 48.4% but lost the Electoral vote 271 to 266. Another problem that can occur is that neither candidate gets the minimum number of electoral votes required to win the election, the only time this has ever happened was in the 1824 Presidential election where then Secretary of State John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) got 84 electoral votes, then Senator Andrew Jackson (1767-1845) of Tennessee got 99 electoral votes, the Secretary of the Treasury at the time William H. Crawford (1772-1834) got 41 electoral votes and the Fourth candidate Speaker of the House Henry Clay (1777-1852) of Kentucky got 37. Since none of them got enough electoral votes it went to the House of Representatives to decide (this is what would happen in the 2016 Presidential election) they chose John Quincy Adams who went on to serve one term as President from 1825-1829.
