Why no foreign-born American as president?

Electors vs. voters

On Nov. 4, will Americans be voting for presidential candidates or for electors?
Voters will be casting their ballots on Nov. 4, 2008 for a slate of electors in each state and the District of Columbia. Those electors, in turn, will cast votes on Dec. 15, 2008 for the candidates to whom they are pledged.

For instance, on the California ballot, there will be a slate of 55 Democratic electors pledged to the Democratic presidential candidate and a slate of 55 Republican electors pledged to the Republican candidate.

A voter will chose one slate or the other (or perhaps the slate of a third party such as the Green Party).

How many electoral votes does it take to win the presidency?
270.

Dividing up the electors among the states

How many electors are there?
538

How are the 538 electors divided among the 50 states?
They are divided roughly on the basis of population. States with large populations, like California and Texas, get lots of electors; states with small populations, like North Dakota and Vermont, get few.

No matter how small its population, each gets at least three electoral votes.

Each state gets a number of electors equal to the number of its members of the House of Representatives (which is proportional to population), plus two — since every state has two senators.

Tennessee, for example, has nine representatives and two senators, therefore it has 11 electoral votes.

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If a state has many illegal immigrants living in it, will it get more representatives in the House, and thus more electoral votes than it would otherwise have?
Yes.

All people, citizens and non-citizens, legal residents and illegal residents, are included in the Census count used to determine state population and representation.

But illegal immigrants may avoid contact with Census enumerators and therefore may be undercounted.

Is the allocation of presidential electors among the states perfectly proportional to each state’s population?
No.

Wyoming, with a voting age population of about 370,000, has three electors. California, with a voting age population of 24.4 million, 66 times bigger than Wyoming’s, has 55 electors, which is only 18 times as many electors as Wyoming has.

This bonus for small states was one of the compromises made at the constitutional convention in 1787 in order to persuade the states with smaller populations to join the Union.

If a majority of a state’s voters in the Nov. 4 general election vote for the Republican ticket, what happens to the slate of Democratic electors?
If a majority of a state’s voters in the Nov. 4 general election vote for the Republican ticket, then the Republican slate of electors is chosen. At that point, the Democratic slate of electors does not matter.

Get to know the electors

Will the voters in each state know who the electors are?
In some states, the electors’ names appear on the Nov. 4 ballot along with the presidential candidates’ names. In other states, the electors' names do not appear on the ballot.

Who selects the electors?
The political parties choose the electors. They are often party loyalists selected as a reward for years of faithful service. They may be elected officials or persons who have personal ties to the presidential candidate.

In 2004, for example, one of the Democratic electors in New Hampshire was former Gov. Jeanne Shaheen, whose husband Bill had run Democratic nominee John Kerry’s primary campaign in that state.

What was the intention of the Framers of the Constitution when it came to the role of  electors?
The intent was that "electors would be free agents, to exercise an independent and nonpartisan judgment as to the men best qualified for the Nation's highest offices,'' Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson wrote in 1952.

But the system has evolved into something quite different from what the Framers intended: electors today almost always act as rubber stamps, chosen by their party to vote for its nominee.

What does the Constitution say about choosing electors?
Article Two says, "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors" equal to the number of senators and representatives to which the state is entitled in the Congress.

Is it up to each state’s legislature to decide how electors are chosen?
Yes. A legislature could for instance, appoint a specific group of electors, such as retired judges, or it could choose electors randomly from a list of the state’s registered voters, or it could say the presidential candidate who wins the most votes nationwide would get all of that state’s electoral votes.

The Constitution does not require that electors be chosen to reflect the popular vote in that state, although the tradition of following the popular vote is well established.

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