We Can Only Have One President at a Time

2016 Election Results

It happens every time. We have any number of candidates for president, and only one wins. Durn it. The winner becomes president and the others do not. People who voted for the losers will feel some measure of disappointment no matter what system we use to choose the winner (singular).

1860 presidential election. (Depicting Abraham Lincoln dancing with a black woman was scandalous at the time)

The United States Constitution defines the method for choosing the president. The electoral college chooses the president:

“Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector. U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section 1, paragraph 2.”

As the Twelfth Amendment specifies (the original method proved to be a disaster, so they amended the Constitution after the 1800 election to fix it), the electors meet in their states and vote for president, sending the results to the president of the Senate, who will open the envelopes in the presence of Congress and count them. If one candidate receives a majority of the votes, that person becomes president. If not, the House of Representatives chooses the president from among the top three winners in the electoral college. This almost never happens.

Note that there is no requirement in the Constitution for any popular vote in this process at all. The only reason why ordinary voters all over the country vote for president is that every state legislature chooses to do it that way. In theory, they could use another method consistently with the Constitution, but their voters might well turn them out.

Note also that each state gets a number of electors “equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.” Every state gets two Senators, regardless of population, and in the original Constitution, state legislatures chose U.S. Senators (we changed that with the Seventeenth Amendment).