Today is the day Americans decide who will be their next president between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
If you have not been living under a rock in the last 10 months, you would have noticed that this year’s election is the most fascinating in recent times, not just because of the individuals involved but also because of the drama surrounding both candidates.
So choosing a president should be easy, right? Is it not just the voters lining up behind their candidate of choice? Err, not quite.
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The popular vote has a minor role deciding who the president is. That power belongs to something called The Electoral College. Here’s how that works: in 1787, the nations’ founders established the Electoral College in order for all parts of the country to have equitable representation in the voting process. This was done to protect states with less populations.
Each state has ‘electors’ whose duty it is to choose their candidate for them. There are currently 538 electors in total, corresponding to the 435 Representatives (congressmen and women) and 100 Senators, plus the three additional electors from Washington D.C. The U.S. Constitution prohibits any federal official, elected or appointed, from being an elector.
But not all states are created equal: the number of electors are determined by the population in that state. For example, Delaware with a population of 936,000 has three electoral votes while California with its 39 million people has 55.
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So as voters head to the ballot box, they are choosing which candidate will receive their state’s electors. Each presidential candidate requires at least 270 electoral votes to win the election.
It follows that depending on the selection of the electors, a candidate can win the popular vote and lose the electoral college. That’s what happened in 2000 when incumbent Vice President Al Gore won the popular vote by 500,000 votes but lost when the Supreme Court determined he had lost the Florida electoral vote.
Stay with us as we bring you details of the 2016 American elections as it unfolds.