LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Electoral College: States
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The Electoral College is a method of indirect popular election of the President of the United States. The authors of the Constitution put this system in place so that careful and calm deliberation would lead to the selection of the best-qualified candidate. Voters in each state actually cast a vote for a block of electors who are pledged to vote for a particular candidate. These electors, in turn, vote for the presidential candidate. Each state is apportioned a number of electors equal to the total number of their Congressional delegation.
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A further problem with the Electoral College is that of "Faithless Electors." These are the electors that promise to cast their vote for the candidate of the opposite party. There is no constitutional protection against these faithless electors and only in about half the states are electors bound by rules or laws to vote for the candidate they are supposed to vote for (Sidems 2001). For example, in 1948, 1960, and 1976 individual electors cast their votes for third party candidates. If there were to be defecting electors in a close race it would worsen the crisis of confidence in the electoral system.
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The Electoral College is made up of 538 electors from each state. To win a candidate must obtain 270 votes, which is a majority of the 538. The number that each state is allocated is determined by the number of representatives that each state has in Congress, in addition three votes are allocated to the District of Columbia. Each state is granted by the Constitution of the United States to have at least one person in the House of Representatives and two Senators. Therefore each state is guaranteed at least three votes in the Electoral College. The District of Columbia under the 23rd Amendment of the Constitution is granted the same number of votes as the smallest state.
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That the Electoral College has "worked" in all but one election since 1888 isn't a good enough reason to stay with the status quo. The college has a perverse impact on campaigns. With no incentive to compete in states that are predictably red or blue, candidates concentrate on the battleground states - only 13 of them in 2004, down from 24 in 1960. That's not the national campaign voters deserve. In the last election, 92 percent of campaign events took place in just 13 states, which ... absorbed 97 percent of advertising during the campaign's final month. Three dozen red and blue states as large as California, New York and Texas and as small as Delaware, Utah and Wyoming were mere spectators.
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The main problem with the Electoral College is that it builds into every election the possibility, which has been a reality three times since the Civil War, that the president will be a candidate who lost the popular vote. This shocks people in other nations who have been taught to look upon the United States as the world's oldest democracy. The Electoral College ... heavily favors small states. The fact that every one gets three automatic electors - one for each senator and a House member - means states that by population might be entitled to only one or two electoral votes wind up with three, four or five.
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The Electoral College was created for two reasons. The first purpose was to create a buffer between population and the selection of a President. The second as part of the structure of the government that gave extra power to the smaller states.
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