How does the Electoral College work in US presidential elections?

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   United States Electoral College (Wikipedia)

   WikipediaPublished Oct 10, 2026Checked Oct 10, 2026

   “In the United States, the Electoral College is the group of presidential electors that is formed every four years for the sole purpose of voting for the president and vice president in the presidential election. This process is described in Article Two of the Constitution. The number of electors from each state is equal to that state's congressional delegation which is the number of senators (two) plus the number of Representatives for that state. Each state appoints electors using legal procedures determined by its legislature. Federal office holders, including senators and representatives, cannot be electors. Federal agencies provide step-by-step descriptions of how electors are appointed, meet in December, and how Congress counts the electoral votes. Additionally, the Twenty-third Amendment granted the federal District of Columbia three electors (bringing the total number from 535 to 538). A simple majority of electoral votes (270 or more) is required to elect the president and vice president. If no candidate achieves a majority, a contingent election is held by the House of Representatives, to elect the president, and by the Senate, to elect the vice president.”

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   1804 United States presidential election (Wikipedia)

   WikipediaPublished Oct 10, 2026Checked Oct 10, 2026

   “Presidential elections were held in the United States from November 1 to December 4, 1804. The Democratic-Republican Party's ticket of incumbent president Thomas Jefferson and former New York governor George Clinton defeated the Federalist Party's ticket of former U.S. minister to France Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and former U.S. minister to the United Kingdom Rufus King. This was the first election held under the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which required separate ballots for president and vice president. Jefferson was unanimously renominated by his party's congressional nominating caucus in February; the caucus selected Clinton to succeed the outgoing vice president, Aaron Burr. A "semisecret" Federalist caucus elevated Pinckney and King as the party's national candidates; while news of the caucus was widely circulated, in states where electors were chosen by popular vote, the Federalist ticket was formally unpledged. Federalists in several states chose not to nominate electors, resulting in a lopsided popular vote margin for Jefferson.”

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   Uncommon and nonpartisan: Antidemocratic attitudes in the American public.

   Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (Holliday et al.)Published Mar 18, 2024Checked Oct 10, 2026

   “In the United States, fundamental democratic norms have recently come under threat from prominent Republican officials. We investigate whether this antidemocratic posture has spread from the elite level to rank-and-file partisans. Exploiting data from a massive repeated cross-sectional and panel survey ([Formula: see text] = 45,095 and 5,231 respectively), we find that overwhelming majorities of the public oppose violations of democratic norms, and virtually nobody supports partisan violence. This bipartisan consensus remains unchanged over time despite high levels of affective polarization and exposure to divisive elite rhetoric during the 2022 political campaign. Additionally, we find no evidence that elected officials' practice of election denialism encourages their constituents to express antidemocratic attitudes. Overall, these results suggest that the clear and present threat to American democracy comes from unilateral actions by political elites that stand in contrast to the views of their constituents. In closing, we consider the implications of the stark disconnect between the behavior of Republican elites and the attitudes of Republican voters.”

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   It's Not Just Trump: Americans of Both Parties Support Liberal Democratic Norm Violations More Under Their Own President.

   Public opinion quarterly (Littvay et al.)Published Oct 23, 2024Checked Oct 10, 2026

   “However, recent experimental research also shows that voters of both parties are more tolerant of norm erosion committed by politicians of the party they prefer. In this note, we aim to reconcile these contradictory findings by analyzing surveys spanning from 2006 to 2021 on the public's tolerance of executive concentration of power. We also collect original data under both the Trump and Biden administrations gauging support for a broad array of liberal democratic norm erosions. Support for such erosions, in fact, has been relatively similar across Democrats and Republicans once we account for the party of the president. Support for executive aggrandizement has been prevalent among supporters of the president's party at least since the second term of the Bush administration. Increased checks and balances on the executive, through divided government, amplifies this effect further. Taken together, these findings suggest that universal support for the liberal democratic status quo has been weaker among those who support the president's party, well before and since the Trump presidency.”

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   Should I vote-by-mail or in person? The impact of COVID-19 risk factors and partisanship on vote mode decisions in the 2020 presidential election.

   PloS one (Atkeson et al.)Published Sep 15, 2022Checked Oct 10, 2026

   “While the evidence is clear that 2020 voters shifted away from Election Day voting in favor of vote-by-mail and early voting, we know very little about how health risk versus party polarization around risk assessment influenced how and when to vote. We rely on individual-level observational data in the form of high-quality official voter administrative records from the State of New Mexico to ask how pandemic-related risk factors, especially voter age along with partisanship influenced voter decision-making. To identify causal factors, we use a difference-in-differences design and hazard model that compare 2020 general election and primary voter behavior to 2018 and 2016. We find that age and party were large factors in vote mode decisions in 2020, but not in 2016 or 2018. We consider the implications of our findings on how health risk and partisanship interact to influence decision-making.”