“You know the old saying: you win some, you lose some, and then there’s that little-known third category.” – Al Gore at the 2004 Democratic National Convention

We had an election on Tuesday, a rather consequential one in my estimation.

I think I am on solid ground saying that since the person who leads the most powerful country in the world was chosen in this election. Perhaps you forgot to place Dec. 17 on your calendar.

By now, you may have figured out I am talking about members of the electoral college casting their votes for president.

If you can reach back into the recesses of your brain to your high school government class, you might have a fuzzy memory of hearing it is only the votes of electors that count when it comes to electing the president.

Naturally you may ask why were you late to work on Nov. 5, when you felt it was your civic duty to drive over to your polling place to vote for president if your vote did not count. Good question.

My 7-year-old daughter and I were watching some old clips of “Schoolhouse Rock” last week and happened to catch an episode explaining the electoral college. When she pressed me for more details about the electoral college, my explanation exploded during takeoff. I teach American government to college students.

I will try again here. To answer your earlier question, your vote in the presidential election last month did count. Though you filled in your bubble next to the names of candidates for president and vice president, you were actually voting for a political party.

For example, if you voted for the Donald Trump and JD Vance ticket, you were voting to allow the Alabama Republican Party to choose the presidential electors for the state.

Obviously, any state party will choose electors the party is certain will vote for the candidates who represent the party. So in a roundabout way your vote for president did count. If the Kamala Harris and Tim Walz ticket had received more votes in Alabama, the Alabama Democratic Party would have chosen the state’s electors.

Each state is allotted electors based on the number of U.S. House of Representatives members it has added to the number of U.S. senators it has. Alabama has seven House members and two senators, so it has nine presidential electors.

States with the largest populations have the most House members, so they get the most electors. California is the state with the largest population, so it has the most electors, currently 54.

A few of our states with the smallest populations only have one House member, so they only are allotted three electoral votes. The 23^rd Amendment also allows Washington, D.C., to have three electoral votes.

All 538 presidential electors cast their votes on the same day, though they do not actually convene in a single place as a single body. The website for the National Archives says it is better to think about the electoral college as more of a process than as a place.

Compromise is the main reason we ended up with this unique system. Some folks at the 1787 constitutional convention wanted Congress to choose the president while others felt this could create too cozy of a relationship between Congress and the president.

Another set of folks wanted the president to be chosen based on a popular vote of the people but others felt an average voter would not know enough about the candidates to cast a reasonable vote.

You have to remember political parties did not exist in any meaningful way at this time, and the only kind of mass media were newspapers – none of which had anything close to a national audience – and books.

The compromise ended up being states would make their own rules for choosing electors to vote for president, and, hopefully, those electors would be knowledgeable enough to make a wise choice. With the rise of political parties in the U.S., states would later allow the state parties to determine the electors if the party’s candidates won the November popular vote.

Occasionally, a candidate will lose a presidential election despite having more votes from the American population than his or her opponent because the losing candidate may win some states by a wide margin but also lose several states by a close margin.

Losing close is the same as losing by a lot in nearly every state as all electors go to one candidate in either scenario. Al Gore learned this the hard way in 2000.

Perhaps I can convince my daughter to proofread this column for me. Maybe it will make more sense than my first botched explanation of the electoral college.