How many electoral votes are needed to win the presidency?

The Electoral College is a group of people that elects the president and the vice president of the United States. The word “college” in this case simply refers to an organized body of people engaged in a common task.

Instead of voting for presidential candidates directly, when Americans cast their vote for president, they are voting to elect specific people, known as electors, to the college. Each state gets a certain number of electoral votes based on its population.

The electors are appointed by the political parties in each state. So if a Republican presidential candidate wins the popular vote in your state, then electors that the Republican Party has chosen will cast votes for that candidate, and vice versa for Democrats.

The Electoral College was born at the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.

The system led to some unusual results from the start, as evident in the election of 1800, in which there was a tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr because they had received an equal number of electoral votes. Congress broke the tie, and Jefferson became president and Burr became vice president. (Until the ratification of the 12th Amendment in 1804, the candidate with the second-highest number of electoral votes became vice president.)

Despite its name, the Electoral College is not a college in the modern educational sense, but refers to a collegium or group of colleagues.

Today, electors are chosen every four years in the months leading up to Election Day, by their respective state’s political parties. Processes vary from state to state, with some choosing electors during state Republican and Democratic conventions, and some states listing electors’ names on the general election ballot.

The process of choosing electors can be an insider’s game, said Kimberly Wehle, a law professor at the University of Baltimore and the author of “What You Need to Know About Voting and Why.” They are often state legislators, party leaders or donors, she said.

Electors meet in their respective states each year on the first Monday after the second Wednesday of December to cast separate ballots for president and vice president, with the candidates who receive a majority of votes being elected.

The brazen plan to create false slates of electors was arguably the longest-running and most expansive of the multiple efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

The Trump plan began with an effort to persuade Republican officials in the targeted states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — to help draft, or to at least put their names on, documents that declared Mr. Trump to be the victor.

The stated rationale for the plan was that Mr. Biden’s victories in those states would be overturned once Mr. Trump’s allies could establish their claims of widespread voting fraud and other irregularities, and that it was only prudent to have the “alternate” slates of electors in place for that eventuality.

But, as Mr. Trump had been told by his campaign aides and, eventually, even his attorney general, there were no legitimate claims of fraud sufficient to change the outcome of the race, and the seven states all certified Mr. Biden’s Electoral College victory on Dec. 14, 2020. Mr. Trump and his allies barreled ahead with the fake electors plan nonetheless, with an increasing focus on using the ceremonial congressional certification process on Jan. 6 to derail the transfer of power.

Once the false pro-Trump slates of electors had been created, Mr. Trump and his allies turned to the second part of the plan: strong-arming Vice President Mike Pence into considering them during the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6. The point was to persuade Mr. Pence to say that the election was somehow flawed or in doubt, or to delay the certification of the electors count. The plan culminated in the violent Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol that unfolded as Mr. Pence refused to do so.

A bipartisan group of senators has proposed new legislation to modernize the Electoral Count Act, a law passed in 1887 that was intended to settle disputes about how America chooses its presidents, which the senators have called “archaic and ambiguous.” President Donald J. Trump attempted to abuse the law on Jan. 6, 2021, to interfere with Congress’s certification of his election defeat.

The legislation aims to guarantee a peaceful transition from one president to the next, after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol exposed how the current law could be manipulated to disrupt the process. The measure would make it more difficult for lawmakers to challenge a state’s electoral votes when Congress meets to count them. It would also clarify that the vice president has no discretion over the results of that count, and it would set out the steps to begin a presidential transition.

While passage of the new legislation cannot guarantee that a repeat of Jan. 6 will not occur in the future, its authors believe that a rewrite of the antiquated law, particularly the provisions related to the vice president’s role, could discourage such efforts and make it more difficult to disrupt the vote count.

It takes at least 270 electoral votes to win the presidency. There are 538 electoral votes in all.

Because there is an even number of electoral votes, a tie is feasible. If that happens in the Electoral College, then the election decision goes to the newly seated House of Representatives, with each state’s representatives voting as a unit.

Each state delegation votes on which candidate to support as a group, with the plurality carrying the day. If there is a tie vote within a state’s delegation, the state’s vote does not count. A presidential candidate needs at least 26 votes to win.

The decision on the vice president goes to the newly elected Senate, with each senator casting a vote. Ultimately, any disputes about the procedure could land everything in the Supreme Court.

A state’s number of electors is identical to the total number of its senators and representatives in Congress. Seven states have the minimum of three electors.

Washington, D.C., also has three electoral votes, thanks to the 23rd Amendment, which gave the nation’s capital as many electors as the state with the fewest electoral votes.

California has the most electoral votes, with 54. Texas is next, with 40, followed by Florida, with 30, and New York, with 28.

Here’s a map with the rest of the numbers.

There are arguments that the states with smaller populations are overrepresented in the Electoral College, because every state gets at least 3 electors regardless of population. In a stark example, sparsely populated Wyoming has three votes and a population of about 580,000, giving its individual voters far more clout in the election than their millions of counterparts in densely populated states like Florida, California and New York. And American citizens who live in territories like Puerto Rico, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands are not represented by any electors.

“When you talk about the Electoral College shaping the election, it shapes the election all the time, because it puts the focus on certain states and not others,” said Alexander Keyssar, a professor of history and social policy at Harvard University.

Most are, and it helps to think of voting on a state-by-state basis, said Akhil Reed Amar, a professor of law and political science at Yale University.

“It’s just like in tennis,” he said. “It’s how many sets you win and not how many games or points you win. You have to win the set, and in our system, you have to win the state.”

Two exceptions to this rule are Maine and Nebraska, which rely on congressional districts to divvy up electoral votes. The winner of the state’s popular vote gets two electoral votes, and one vote is awarded to the winner of the popular vote in each congressional district.

Yes, and that is what happened in 2016: Although Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote by almost three million votes, Donald J. Trump garnered almost 57 percent of the electoral votes, enough to win the presidency.

The same had thing happened in 2000. Although Al Gore won the popular vote, George W. Bush earned more electoral votes after a contested Florida recount and a Supreme Court decision.

And in 1888, Benjamin Harrison defeated the incumbent president, Grover Cleveland, in the Electoral College, despite losing the popular vote. Cleveland ran again four years later and won back the White House.

Other presidents who lost the popular vote but won the presidency include John Quincy Adams and Rutherford B. Hayes, in the elections of 1824 and 1876.

The House of Representatives picked Adams over Andrew Jackson, who had won the popular vote but only a plurality of the Electoral College. A special commission named by the House chose Hayes over Samuel J. Tilden, after 20 electoral votes in Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina were disputed.

The Electoral College has also awarded the presidency to candidates with the most popular votes but not a majority (more than half) in a number of cases, notably Abraham Lincoln in 1860, John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996.

People call them “faithless electors.” In 2016, seven electors — 5 Democrats and 2 Republicans — broke their promise to vote for their party’s nominee, the most ever in history. They voted for a variety of candidates not on the ballot, but it did not change the outcome.

Thirty-three states and the District of Columbia have laws that require electors to vote for their pledged candidate. Some states replace electors and cancel their votes if they break that pledge.

Penalties exist in other states. In New Mexico, electors can be charged with a felony if they abandon their pledge, and in Oklahoma a faithless elector could face a misdemeanor charge.

Whether electors should be able to change their positions has been heavily debated, so much so that the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in July 2020 that states may require electors to abide by their promise to support a specific candidate.

Some scholars have said they do not wholeheartedly agree with that decision, arguing that it endangers an elector’s freedom to make the decisions they want, and that electors are usually picked for their loyalty to a candidate or party.

“They will do as promised if the candidates do a very good job vetting them and picking people who are rock solid,” said Akhil Reed Amar, a professor of law and political science at Yale University.

For years there have been debates about abolishing the Electoral College entirely, with the 2016 election bringing the debate back to the surface. It was even a talking point among 2020 Democratic presidential candidates.

The idea has public support, but faces a partisan divide, since Republicans currently benefit from the electoral clout of less populous, rural states.

In 2020, Gallup reported that 61 percent of Americans supported abolishing the Electoral College in favor of the popular vote. However, that support diverges widely based on political parties, with support from 89 percent of Democrats and only 23 percent of Republicans.

One route to changing the system would be a constitutional amendment, which would require two-thirds approval from both the House and Senate and ratification by the states, or a constitutional convention called by two-thirds of the state legislatures.

Some hope to reduce the Electoral College’s importance without an amendment. Fifteen states and the District of Columbia, which together control 195 electoral votes, have signed on to an interstate compact in which they pledge to grant their votes to the winner of the national popular vote. The local laws would take effect only once the compact has enough states to total 270 electoral votes.

An election-related case could find its way to the Supreme Court, which would lend greater importance to the judicial makeup of the court, said Kimberly Wehle, a law professor at the University of Baltimore

“It only takes five people with life tenure to actually amend this Constitution through a judicial opinion,” she said.