So…how does the Electoral College work again?

This article is part of A Children's Guide to Choosinga 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 appears in the print edition of The Times on the last Sunday of each month.

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

If your school elects a class representative, the math is simple: the child with the most votes wins. The presidential election is more complicated. When people cast their votes, their votes do not go directly to Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. Instead, they go through the Electoral College, a system in which people representing different states elect the president.

So what exactly is the Electoral College? It's a group of hundreds of people, called voters, who speak for the voters in their state. As a rule, these are politically active people such as activists or volunteers. You can think of them like team captains speaking for their fellow Pennsylvanians, Colorado, Wisconsin, etc. Each state has a different number of electors and each elector receives one electoral vote.

On Election Day, voters like your parents will cast their votes in their states. Then state officials tally up all the votes.

Here's where things get weird: The candidate who gets the most votes in your state wins all Your state's Electoral College votes (except in Maine and Nebraska, where things are done differently). So if a candidate receives even 51 percent of the vote in New York State, he or she will receive all 28 electoral votes.

How many votes does each state get? It depends on its population. States with more people get more: California has the most at 54 and Texas has the second most at 40. The states with the fewest people, such as Alaska and Delaware, have only three. If you add up all the electoral votes in all 50 states (plus Washington, DC!), you get a total of 538 electoral votes.

The Electoral College means that candidates running for president don't have to worry about the total number of votes they receive across the country. They just need to win enough states to get 270 electoral votes – which is just over half of 538.

In almost all states, voters are required by law to vote for their state's chosen candidate. This means that once the votes are counted in each state, we will know who won. States then certify the results, and voters meet on December 17 to officially cast their votes. On January 6th, Congress will count and certify the results, and the new president will be sworn in on January 20th.

So, uh…why do we do it this way? We have the Electoral College because the men who founded America disagreed about how the new country should elect a president. Some of them believed that only members of Congress should vote. Others said everyone in the country should vote for the president. And another group worried that states with larger populations had too much power in electing the president. As a compromise, they created the Electoral College.

Not everyone thinks this 237-year-old system is fair. Some believe it gives voters too much power in some swing states. They believe that the person who receives the most votes of all Americans should win. That doesn't always happen: Hillary Clinton received almost three million more votes than Donald Trump in 2016, but still lost the election by just 232 electoral votes. Politicians and activists have suggested changing this system, but so far no one has done so. The Electoral College is still the way American democracy works – and how the next president will be elected this November.

Ready to join in? Now that you know the lay of the land, print out this Electoral College map and fill it out on election night.

Instructions: Grab two crayons – red for Donald Trump and blue for Kamala Harris. When a candidate wins a state, mark them on the map. Then fill in the same number of fields in the vote counter, column by column. (Note that Maine and Nebraska split their votes, so check the news for these numbers.) The first to cross the median line or reach 270 electoral votes wins.