Illinois has 19 electoral votes. Here's how the Electoral College works for the state
As you may remember from your civics classes in school, the President of the United States is not elected by direct popular vote.
The U.S. Constitution specifies that each state gets same number of electors as its total number of representatives and senators in Congress, and the founders left it up to the states to determine how they would choose their electors.
There are a total of 538 electoral votes. A total of 270 is needed for a presidential candidate to win.
A winner-take-all system in Illinois
Illinois has 19 electoral votes, as the state has two U.S. senators like every other state, along with 17 U.S. representatives.
Like all but two U.S. states, Illinois has a winner-take-all system, in which all the state's electoral votes go to the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote in the state.
Two states, Maine and Nebraska, use a proportional system in which they allocate two electoral votes to the winner of the statewide popular vote, and then one to the popular vote winner in each congressional district.
If the Democratic candidate wins the popular vote — as he or she has in Illinois in every election since 1988 — voters are selecting a slate of electors pledged to vote for the Democratic candidate. If the Republican candidate wins the popular vote, voters are selecting a slate of electors pledged to the Republican candidate.
On Dec. 11, Illinois and all the other states will turn in certificates of ascertainment, which list the names of the electors chosen by the winning candidate for president and the results of the votes cast for each slate of electors, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
The electoral college meets on Dec. 17 to cast its ballots officially. The electoral votes will be read aloud in a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2025.
Do Illinois electors have to follow their state's popular vote?
Until this year, there was no law on the books in Illinois requiring electors to vote for the presidential ticket that won the state's popular vote. But that changed in July, when Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker signed into law a wide-ranging package of legislation regarding elections that included such a measure.
Regardless of the law on the books, Illinois electors have consistently voted in accordance with the state's popular vote for president. There have been cases of "faithless" electors who defied the popular vote — with a total of seven in the 2016 presidential race.