So … How Does the Electoral College Work, Again?

This article is part of A Kid’s Guide to the Election, a collection of stories about the 2024 presidential election for readers ages 8 to 14, written and produced by The New York Times for Kids. This section is published in The Times’s print edition on the last Sunday of every month.

Every four years, there’s one thing everybody is talking about: the Electoral College. It’s not a school, despite what it sounds like. It’s the unique way that the United States elects its presidents. And if we’re honest, it’s pretty confusing. Here’s a breakdown of how that process works.

When your school elects a class president, the math is simple: The kid who gets the most votes wins. The presidential election is more complicated. When people cast their ballots, their votes won’t go straight to Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. Instead, they go through the Electoral College, a system in which people who represent different states elect the president.

So what is the Electoral College, specifically? It’s a group of hundreds of people called electors who speak for voters in their state. They are usually people involved with politics, like activists or volunteers. You can sort of think of them like team captains who speak for their fellow Pennsylvanians, Coloradans, Wisconsinites and so on. Each state has a different number of electors, and each elector gets one electoral vote.