It is my pleasure to announce the publication a Revised and Expanded Edition of Eric Burin’s Picking the President: Understanding the Electoral College. This edition features over a dozen new contributions, an expanded documents section, as well as all the essays in the original edition of the book. This new edition also includes a description and the results of survey conducted by the book’s editor and titled “The Electoral College in the American Mind.” 

As many of you know, the first edition of this book was a best seller for my little press logging thousands of downloads and hundreds in sales. We hope that this new, revised and expanded edition, will continue to inspire critical and informed conversations about the American electoral system for years to come.

As always the book is available as a free download or as a low-cost paperback. If you like the book, it helps The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota when you spread the word over social media, by posting reviews on Amazon, or by good, old-fashioned word of mouth. If you really like the book, it helps the press’s mission materially when you buy a copy. 

Check out a copy of the book here. And read the press release below the fold! 

A REVISED AND EXPANDED VERSION OF THE MODERN CLASSIC 
PICKING THE PRESIDENT: UNDERSTANDING THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE SUPPORTS A DEEPER, MORE THOROUGH UNDERSTANDING OF HOW AMERICANS ELECT THEIR PRESIDENT

Have you ever wondered why the Electoral College is so complicated and unusual, and why the United States adopted this way of conducting presidential elections?

Picking the President: Understanding the Electoral College provides an expansive view of the US electoral system by showcasing brief essays by historians, political scientists, legal experts, and other scholars, as well as a massive selection of original documents from the Constitutional Convention, all of which shed light on the high-stakes debates surrounding the selection of the chief executive.

Volume editor and historian Eric Burin explains: “This volume is a revised and expanded version of the original Picking the President which appeared in 2017. That book turned out to be successful enough to warrant a follow up that would continue to engage people’s curiosity about the Electoral College, promote understanding of the subject, and fan further interest in it.”

The Expanded and Revised Edition is three times the size of the original volume. Over the past eight years, the first edition of Picking the President became a surprise best seller with hundreds of paper copies in circulation and garnering thousands of digital downloads. During that time, the book’s editor, Eric Burin, continued to dig deeper into the history of the Electoral College and modern attitudes toward the institution. By 2024, Burin was ready to produce a Revised and Expanded Edition of the original classic.

Burin explains that in addition to his new introduction: “The Revised and Expanded Edition has three new sections. The first section includes all the essays from first edition of Picking the President written in the aftermath of the 2016 election. The second section features a wide-ranging variety of essays on the Electoral College which platform new voices and present new perspectives. Finally, the book includes a magnificent collection of historical resources on the topic, making it appropriate for the interested public and suitable for use in the civics or American history classroom.”

Burin makes clear that this new edition of the book has the same goal as the first: to better illuminate the Electoral College: “The essays provide multiple viewpoints on the Electoral College while the historical resources empower readers to develop their own ideas on the subject.”

Like all books from The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota, Picking the President: Understanding the Electoral College. Revised and Expanded Edition is available as a free digital download and as a low-cost paperback from Amazon.com.