The morning of Nov. 9th arrives. Some of the country grimaces while others cheer as the results of the election are reported. But the votes cast on Nov. 8 do little to select the next President of the United States.

    The national election is nothing but an opinion poll for the electoral college. Who you were really voting for was not Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, but a group of electors nominated by the Republican and Democratic parties to select the president at the meeting of the Electoral College in Congress on Dec. 12.

    There are 538 electors in the college, distributed based on the state’s population with a minimum of three delegates per state. Current delegate projections give Trump 306 votes and Clinton 228 votes out of the total delegates, with a 270 vote majority required to win, even though Clinton won the popular vote by a projected 1-2 million votes.

    In the meeting of the electoral college, each delegate selected by their state’s winning party will cast their ballot for President and Vice-President. Even though the electors pledge to vote for the winner of their state’s election, they are only legally bound to do so in some states.

Some people are now calling for the electoral college to be abolished and for the country to make the popular vote decide the presidency instead of the electoral college. They view the system as unnecessary and undemocratic.

    The electoral college has been in place since the founding of the United States because of the logistics of voting in the 1700s. Every state would organize elections and the people would choose their candidate — and therefore their delegates. The electoral college delegates would then go to Washington to vote on behalf of the people.

    The electoral college exists because running an election of that scale was impractical for the time. It also allowed news to be taken into account, as word traveled slow before television and online news. The electoral college delegates are selected to act on the best behalf of the people that selected them in the election.

    There is still a chance that Clinton can win the presidency if she can sway 40 Republican delegates to vote for her instead, but don’t get your hopes up. Only 108 electors in the entirety of American history have cast their ballots for the candidate that did not win their state’s election. An upset for Clinton is unprecedented and nearly impossible.

    Even though the 2016 presidential election may seem like a done deal, and likely is, the real election is still yet to occur.