OHIO, USA — Former President Donald Trump is projected to carry Ohio for a third time on Tuesday, defeating his opponent Vice President Kamala Harris.
While the 2024 presidential election hasn’t been officially called yet, Trump managed to capture Ohio’s 17 electoral votes on Election Day.
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Ohio experienced a change with its electoral votes this year. While the Electoral College for decades has had 538 votes for which presidential candidates must vie, how those votes are dolled out to states does change frequently.
Ohio is one of seven states that lost one electoral vote, while six states gained representation.
What is the Electoral College?
The U.S. is the only democracy in the modern era to use the Electoral College, which appoints electors to represent each state’s interests when it comes time to certify election results and count the vote.
Each state gets as many electors as it has members of Congress. Washington, D.C. also has three Electoral College votes. There are 538 electoral votes up for grabs and in order to win the presidency, a candidate has to secure 270 of them.
In 48 of the 50 states, the Electoral College operates in a winner-take-all system, meaning whichever candidate wins in the popular vote in that state gets all of its electoral votes. Maine and Nebraska use what's called the "congressional district method," giving two electoral votes to the state popular vote winner and one vote to the popular vote winner in each congressional district.
States that lost electoral votes
Among the states losing electoral votes, California remains the most populous in the U.S. but dropped one electoral vote to 54. Other Democratic strongholds seeing decreases include Illinois and New York, each losing one electoral vote.
The battleground swing states of Michigan and Pennsylvania, which flipped from Trump in 2016 to President Joe Biden in 2020, lost one electoral vote each. Both have attracted significant attention from Harris and Trump during the 2024 campaign.
Ohio and West Virginia, both of which backed Trump in recent elections, also saw their electoral votes decrease by one.
Why did the Electoral College representation change?
These changes resulted from the Method of Equal Proportions, the mathematical formula used to determine congressional representation based on state population shifts documented in the 2020 Census.
The Electoral College consists of each state's congressional delegation — one vote for each House member and senator — plus three votes for the District of Columbia.
