The night before electors for the 2024 presidential race were announced, 19-year-old Kaveesh Pathak wasn’t sure he was going to win. He had spent the last two weeks calling and campaigning to become one of the 11 Massachusetts Democrats to serve on the Electoral College and found out his name wasn’t on some ballots.

Later that day, he was surprised to learn that he had been chosen to represent Massachusetts in the selection of the 47th President of the United States — and cast a ballot for the Harris/Walz ticket in a ceremony in the Massachusetts State House on Dec. 17.

It’s a formal process spelled out in the Constitution, largely overlooked until 2020 when Donald Trump heightened awareness by challenging the results in the formal tally of the Electoral College votes by Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.

Created as a compromise between the election of the president by a vote in Congress or by a popular vote of qualified citizens it has resulted in three elections where the popular vote winner did not enter the White House, twice in this century. It also has spurred calls for a change short of a Constitutional Convention.

For Democratic and Republican party activists, it’s an honor.

“I’ve been calling for two weeks straight, every day after work. You know, spent three to four hours calling, even at friends’ houses I was calling people. My friends said I was crazy,” Pathak said.

A sophomore studying political science and business at Northeastern University, he was not initially going to run as an elector. When Kamala Harris became the nominee he “saw an opportunity to be able to represent the Indian-American community,” he said.

“I felt like that was a really important thing for me to do,” Pathak said.

Sharon Stout, president of the 11 electors and chair of Emerge Massachusetts, an organization that helps train Democratic women who want to run for office, said it was a “humbling honor to be elected the president of the class.”

Running as an elector is similar to running for office. A candidate has to call and email members of their state committees, so people know to vote for them. Stout has been involved in politics for over 35 years, she said.

“When running for the Electoral College, part of my ask was, part of my speech was: I’ve been working in politics for over 30 years,” Stout said. “Please consider giving me one of your votes. I do feel this is the highest honor you can reach as a political activist.”

Electoral College explained

The Electoral College has selected all 45 American presidents. When people go to the ballot box on the first Tuesday in November they are actually casting a vote for an elector pledged to the party nominee. There are 538 electors, equal to the number of House and Senate members in each state plus three for the District of Columbia. A presidential candidate needs at least 270 to win.

Voters decide which candidate to support but the general election results determine which slate of electors will convene, according to the National Archives.

Massachusetts law designates state party committees to choose who will represent them.

The Electoral College has never really been popular with the American public. When the winner of the popular vote and electoral vote were different in 2000 and 2016, it made people more aware that the votes could separate, said John Fortier, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

“It’s not been super popular in recent days,” Fortier said. “Of course, you know, we have had, in the last 24 years, more talk about the possibility of the popular vote going one way and the Electoral College going the other way.”

Fortier said the Founding Fathers had concerns about both direct election and giving the sole authority to Congress.

It was also rooted in racism and gave rural states disproportionate power, said Aaron Scherb, the senior director of legislative affairs at Common Cause, a nonpartisan, grassroots organization focused on what it says is upholding the core values of American democracy.

At the time of its establishment, only white, land-owning men were able to vote and the country has expanded beyond that, Scherb said.

Fortier said the Electoral College does give states an opportunity to participate in the process, and it allows for different voting methods, such as mail-in balloting.

“It gives the states and the federal government the opportunity to create a system of balance,” Fortier said.

It also gives both parties a chance to oversee the election process, he added.

“You have people there to watch, even at the level of opening absentee ballots or counting the ballots or recounting things, you often have observers of both parties there,” Fortier said.

But the system also reflects the reality that the Founding Fathers never saw a country on the scale of the United States having a national election. Nor did they trust the general public to choose a president, said John Kowal, the Brennan Center for Justice’s vice president of program initiatives.

There have been calls to change or abolish the Electoral College altogether and go with a national popular vote. It would take a constitutional amendment to do that, something requiring two-third votes in the House and Senate and ratification by three-quarters of the states. That has only been done 27 times in the nation’s history.

It could also be changed through a Constitutional Convention called for by two-thirds of the states, something that has never happened.

Interstate compact

A proposal calling for a national popular vote interstate compact could change the process without abolishing the Electoral College. Under this agreement, states will pledge their electors to the candidate who gets the most votes across the country, Kowal said.

“It wouldn’t get rid of the Electoral College, but it would make the Electoral College dependent on the national popular vote, rather than the vote of individual states,” Kowal said.

Scherb said the compact could come into effect in the next four to six years.

“I think a neat feature of the national popular vote interstate compact is that it does not take a constitutional amendment,” Scherb said. “You can do it state by state.”

An interstate compact is not a new concept. States use them when they have shared interests such as economic or environmental reasons. This compact is designed so that everyone has a chance to participate in the democratic process, Scherb said.

“It’s really a bedrock of American democracy, the principle of one-person, one-vote, and that no matter what, your voice should count the same,” Scherb said. “Whether irrespective of the size of your pockets or what your zip code is, your vote should matter the same.”

Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have agreed to this compact and together they have 209 electoral votes, Kowal said. This compact would not go into effect until there are 270 electoral votes pledged, Fortier added.

Massachusetts adopted the compact in August 2010.

“The game would be to win the national popular vote, and that would mean that Democrats and Republicans would go to where their voters are and to try to get them to come out,” Kowal said.

“It was possible that sort of, somewhat through the back door, we could get rid of the Electoral College,” Fortier said. “I think that has some dangers, because that system is sort of a halfway house, but, but it would be a way that, essentially, the popular vote would be preferred … so I don’t think it’s out of the question, but I do think it’s still difficult.”

The compact also would change campaign strategy as candidates would need to visit the entire country. Swing states currently receive the majority of the advertising and this new compact would require outreach across the country, Scherb said.

“I think it would be a much more equal distribution of not only campaign visits, but also campaign spending across the board,” Scherb said.

‘A relic of a totally different time’

In the meantime, Common Cause and other organizations are hoping to educate the public and work with lawmakers to introduce these ideas, he said.

“It’s a marathon, you know, where we recognize this is not a kind of a flip the switch and make this happen overnight,” Scherb said.

The compact could also be risky because if there are more than two candidates one candidate would have to get more than half to win, according to Joshua Holzer, an associate professor of political science at Westminster College in Fulton, MO.

Another possible solution would include proportional representation. Under the current winner-takes-all system a candidate gets all the electoral votes if they get 50.1% of the vote. according to Protect Democracy.

“We elect governors and senators and House members and state legislators by popular vote,” Kowal said. “You know, it’s only the president that we don’t.”

The Brennan Center’s Kowal said the Electoral College won a lot of support at the time of its creation because of southern delegates. And the Three Fifths Compromise, which counted three out of every five enslaved persons when determining a state’s total population for legislative representation and taxation, inflated southern states’ power.

“They never imagined that there would be social movements and political parties and all the things we have today,” Kowal said. “It’s a relic of a totally different time.”

“I think finding a parallel path to the Electoral College is a kind of a natural progression for us to as we move beyond some of our racist roots of this country,” Scherb said.

Hannah Edelheit writes for the Gazette from the Boston University Statehouse Program.