Too Hundred 7 Tea

This year I have noticed more newsreels shown that question who the electors actually are and what it is they do in the election. One hears the media throw around the number 270 but what is its significance?

Two hundred seventy refers to the number of electoral votes a candidate needs to win a majority of the 538 votes in the Electoral College. The majority winner becomes President.

The College is set up similarly to Congress; there is a static number and a number based on population. The Constitutional minimum is three, two for a state’s number of senators and at least one for the number of House Representatives. The Census determines the population for each state, but as The Electoral College Primer points out, “[i]f a presidential election falls in the same year as a census, the initial election of the new decade is governed by the apportionments based on the census a full decade before, and the new census figures will not go into effect until the presidential election four years subsequent” (Longley and Peirce 1996: 94).

This was the case during the 2000 Presidential Election which ran on apportionments from 1990. The new millennium was also a census year, but the change in a state’s population was not reflected until the 2004 election. For a country that stresses the need of justice I find it ironic that the highest office in the United States government can be elected on such unjust grounds. Had the College been apportioned justly for the 2000 election, the past eight years might have been in the hands of a different president.