How the electoral college works

10/17/24 • 13 min

1 Listener

Remembering all the complex details of how the electoral college works is not exactly easy. And just when you’ve mastered how it all adds up, you probably won’t need to think about it again for another four years — hardly a formula for cementing something in your brain. “Try This” host Cristina Quinn is here to help.

The first class in our three-part series on the electoral college explains how the system works, the complicated way electoral votes are assigned and awarded, and what happens between Election Day and Inauguration Day. Washington Post politics reporters Aaron Blake and Amy Gardner join Cristina to make the whole thing so accessible that your high school civics teacher would be proud.

Here are some resources if you’d like to dive deeper into the electoral college:

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Here are some resources if you’d like to dive deeper into the electoral college:

Subscribe to The Washington Post or connect your subscription in Apple Podcasts.

Previous Episode

Post Reports: How to make sense of political polls

The team behind “Try This” is dedicated to helping listeners learn new things, in ways that feel doable. So we're sharing a recent “Post Reports” episode about how polling works.

On this episode of The Washington Post’s daily news podcast, “Post Reports,” Martine Powers speaks with The Post’s deputy polling director, Emily Guskin. Emily explains how a poll comes to be, details what to look for when trying to understand whether a poll is trustworthy, and breaks down once and for all what “margin of error” really means.

As the U.S. presidential election gets closer, “Try This” will release a new audio course dedicated to bettering ourselves through civic engagement. Stick to this feed to find that course soon.

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Next Episode

How we ended up with the electoral college system

In the second class in our series about how the electoral college works, host Cristina Quinn talks to historian Alex Keyssar of the Harvard Kennedy School about the compromises that drove the Founding Fathers to land on a complex, winner-takes-all system rather than a straightforward popular vote.

Keyssar walks listeners through the evolution of our voting system in the years following the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, and how things like electoral vote ties, the introduction of political parties and the end of slavery eventually led to the version of the voting system we have today.

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