The Electoral College is the way that Presidents of the United States gain the office of the presidency. Each state has a specified number of delegates, and the popular vote in each state determines how the state's designated electors are to vote. In this way, the President is chosen not solely on the basis of the national popular vote totals, but more so on the basis of state-by state vote totals.
As defined by the US National Archives, "The Electoral College is a process, not a place. The founding fathers established it in the Constitution as a compromise between election of the President by a vote in Congress and election of the President by a popular vote of qualified citizens. The Electoral College process consists of the selection of the electors, the meeting of the electors where they vote for President and Vice President, and the counting of the electoral votes by Congress."
Electoral votes are allocated among the states based on the Census. Every state is allocated a number of votes equal to the number of senators and representatives in its U.S. Congressional delegation—two votes for its senators in the U.S. Senate plus a number of votes equal to the number of its members in the U. S. House of Representatives.
So the number of electoral votes each state gets (of the 538 total electoral votes) is recalculated every ten years, based on the most recent US Census data.
