By Matthew Stringer

All just governments are established to provide for the protection of our rights and our future security. The core of this expression as stated Declaration of Independence captures the sentiment carried by the founding fathers in designing the new government. They knew all too well that the form and structure of government is an essential component for its just operation.

Enshrined throughout our constitution are many structural restraints that define our constitutional republic; the highlight of this design is the electoral system by which the nation’s chief executive is selected, known today as the Electoral College.

In designing our system of government, the founders carried numerous concerns in mind in establishing the office of the President that they wished to avoid. The concentration of power, lack of checks and balances were just some of their concerns. They just had an abusive King, and they didn’t want another.

Weary of the “factions” of mob rule, foreign influence, and other considerations, the founders determined that the President and Vice-President should be selected by Electors of each state, and to protect them from undue influence and to ensure they represent the interests of their state, the Elector would meet within their respective states and never as a collective body.

Members of the Electoral College are known as Presidential Electors. The Constitution allocates Electors to each state and ties their number to each state’s representation in congress.

The 23rd Amendment also gave Washington D.C. representation in the Electoral College and its three votes together with the rest brings the total number to 538 Electors.

The process generally works as follows: Article 2 of the Constitution gives state legislatures total say over how their Presidential Electors are selected. While the legislature has the power to outright appoint Electors, every state has established the position as an elected office, so technically, when you go to vote in the Presidential Election in November, your vote is going to select your choice of Presidential Elector.

While Presidential Electors are the actual candidate on the ballot, it has been a long practice to show which candidates the Electors support, usually by showing affiliation with a political party, and their party’s Presidential ticket nominees. Some states, like Texas, have decided to remove any mention of the Presidential Electors from the ballot, and instead declare via statute that a vote for a party’s ticket will be considered a vote for the corresponding slate of Elector candidates.

The Electors meet within their respective states all on the same day throughout the nation, presently this day is set to occur on December 14, and will then cast ballots for the President and Vice-President of the United States.

Once the ballots are cast, official records of the results are transmitted to the incumbent Vice-President, who will open and read the results of the vote in each state before a joint session of the new Congress in January.

A candidate must receive a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed, presently 270, to outright be elected to either office. If a state fails to appoint an Elector, the threshold is reduced.

In the rare occurrence that no candidate for President receives a majority of the Electoral votes cast, a special election is held in the United States House of Representatives to elect the President from three candidates receiving the highest number of electoral votes.

However, in a House election for President, rather than a vote of majority strength of the chamber, each state is entitled to one vote, and it takes a majority of states to elect. A majority of each state’s delegation in Congress is required to cast their state’s lone vote.

In the instance that no candidate for Vice-President receives enough votes to be outright elected, the United States Senate selects the Vice-President from the top two candidates receiving electoral votes, with the selection being made by majority vote.

While this serves as a general overview of the process, the details, and possibilities that surround the process being vast, it does serve to describe some of its key characteristics that in effect, protect the sovereignty and interests of the states, protects against mob rule, requires a candidate to gain a broad basis of support, prevents populous states from making the voice of rural states irrelevant, and provides the states with a power of check and balance against the federal executive branch.

The late Justice Antonin Scalia was attributed to having told a group of students that without the structural restraints the rest of the constitution places on government powers, the Bill of Rights is simply a parchment promise.

The Electoral College is one of those great structural restraints that has worked remarkably well for hundreds of years. As long as we continue to share and understand the principles that our founders understood with the next generation, the Electoral College will continue to work in the many ways it was intended to for years to come.

Matthew Stringer is from Odessa, Texas, and is set to serve his second term in Texas as Presidential Elector for the Trump/Pence Presidential Ticket.