Candidates for the president and vice president run as a team. In most of the states, the names of the candidates rather than the names of the electors appear on the ballot, but in other states, both candidates and electors are on the ballot. The winner in each state is determined by counting the votes of the electors; the state receiving the most electoral votes is the winner. In a perfect world, this system would work well. Some states would have more votes that others because of their population and it would be pretty fair, but this is not a perfect world and there are problems with this system.
The biggest problem with the Electoral College system is "faithless voters". "Faithless voters" are the voters in the Electoral College who pledge to vote a certain candidate but do not. When this happens, the people are not truly being represented by the system. This happened in 1976, when an elector in Washington cast his vote for Ronald Reagan instead of Gerald Ford, the candidate whom he pledged to vote. Earlier than that in 1972, another elector in Virginia was supposed to vote for Nixon but instead voted for the Libertarian party candidate. It is possible that people can change their minds. When they are elected to vote for a certain candidate and decide to change their vote to another that is wrong. Basically, the biggest problem of faithless electors is that the candidate who wins the popular vote could possibly wind up one or two votes short of the majority in the Electoral College and may lose the election just on a technicality. A candidate that probably should have won will not. This becomes even more likely when there are third-party candidates who can try and persuade electors before they vote. Another big problem with the Electoral College is the possibility that an election could be thrown into the House of Representatives to be decided. .
Many people who are against the Electoral College say that the possibility that an election could be thrown into the House of Representatives would be undemocratic.
