PowerMedia

The Electoral College

This link has a good primer on how the Electoral College works.

To sum it up in very general terms, the Electoral College, aka Article II of the Constitution:

- The Electoral College is, in many ways, a legacy of our 18th century beginnings;

- Electoral College began when the majority of Americans were rural, and relatively uninformed due to distances and lack of communications infrastructure;

- The basic premise was that the voters would select the wisest among us to make the choices, similar, but not exactly the same as the theory behind the Supreme Court's role. So each state sets the specifics on their electors, some may be appointed; some states have elections for the electors themselves. Somewhere on your recent ballots, you probably had a chance to vote for an elector.

- Changing it would de difficult, requiring a Constitutional Amendment. This would require a 2/3 majority of all states approval as a minimum requirement.

- States with small populations would lose tremendous influence if the above amendment were to pass, and are not expected to allow that to happen.

- Individual states may different ways of selecting the electors by their individual laws.

- "Winner Take All" practice allows all the states electoral votes to be awarded to the candidate that has the most votes from that state. Only Maine and Nebraska allow the distribution of the electoral votes to reflect the states actual percentage of votes to the candidates.
.