Making sense of the US presidential election

You may just possibly have heard that they are having a presidential election in the United States in November. Alongside all the drama and debate, you might also be wondering exactly how the election process works.

For in the United States, it is not the overall number of votes for each candidate that decides who wins. That would have seemed the obvious way to do it, wouldn’t it? And since they don’t use that obvious method, why on earth not?

Well, part of the context is that the United States is a federation of 50 states rather than simply one country. When the American Revolution happened back in the late 18th century, the 13 colonies who came together to overthrow the British Empire saw themselves as independent states, who banded together because they had no hope standing alone against the British. When Thomas Jefferson spoke of his ‘country’, he meant Virginia. The United States of America means exactly what it says – united, but in very many respects fiercely independent.

There is another key bit of context. The founders of this United States overthrew a King and replaced him with a Republic. Now while they were democrats, they were also very wary of democracy. They didn’t much like the idea of the people directly electing anyone, much less a president who they feared would soon become like a king, and even a despot, if he was elected directly. They feared the rule of the mob that would then become the tyranny of an individual.

So because of these historical circumstances, the founders created what they called an ‘Electoral College’, made up of delegates from each state. It is these people, meeting together, who vote to elect the president. In the earlier days of the American Republic, these delegates were decided on by the parliaments in each of the states, but over time, the decision on who should be in the Electoral College came to be decided by the citizens in a popular vote. That is what has become what we all know as Presidential Election Day, when strictly speaking it is the day when people decide who should be in the Electoral College. That has not been a smooth line of progress, especially if you are a person of colour, for all over the United States, since its first days right up to now, attempts have been made to deny the franchise to those whose ancestors were brought to that land in bondage.

But, for now, back to the Electoral College. Each state is entitled to send a certain number of delegates to the Electoral College. How is that determined precisely? It is determined by the number of representatives your state sends to Congress. Every state has two Senators and each state elects a number of members of the House of Representatives, which is based on the size of your population.

So, if your state has 15 members of the House, with your two Senators, that would mean your state will send 17 people to attend and vote at the Electoral College, and thus your state has 17 ‘electoral votes’. That example I chose just there is Ohio, and whoever wins Ohio on the day of the presidential election, will get 17 people from their camp to cast 17 votes for them in the Electoral College. California, a much bigger state, has 54 votes. Hawaii has three. It is very important to note that while the number of electoral college votes your state has is the same number as the size of your state’s Congressional delegation, the people who vote in the Electoral College and the Senators and Congress men and women from that state are not the same people. How they are chosen is an important point we will get to.

Now all that is complex enough until you get to the next bit. Forty-eight of 50 states give all their Electoral College votes to the winner of the popular vote in their state. If you win California by 51% to 49%, you get 54 votes. Your opponent gets zero. Same in Ohio. Same in Hawaii. It is winner takes all.

But because the United States is a federation of states, there is no overall rule about how this is done. There are two states that do it differently. Maine and Nebraska award one electoral vote to the popular vote winner in each of their congressional districts and their remaining two electoral votes go to whoever wins the overall vote in the state. Because everything in the United States is so polarised, Republicans in California (where Democrats always win) would like to divide up their electoral college votes like Maine and Nebraska. Democrats in Texas (where Republicans always win these days) would like to do the same, but for now that’s not on the cards.

But of course that isn’t the end of it. The District of Columbia, the area in which Washington DC sits, is not in a state. The city, because it is the federal capital, governs itself and has to have a separate provision. So it gets its own three votes in the Electoral College. The Democrats always win those.

So, when you have gotten your maths degree through figuring all that out, and you count all that up across all the states in total, you will find that the Electoral College has 538 members. To win the presidency you therefore have to get at least 270 of those votes. That, in US presidential elections, is the magic number.

So far, so easy, sort of. When the election happens, each candidate wins a certain number of states, and the Electoral College votes are allocated out according to the above formula. Now, up until recently that was all fairly uncontroversial. The state government would certify the result in their state and the respective winning party would choose a slate of delegates from their own party as members of the Electoral College. They are usually party big wigs, chairperson of this, organising director of that, that sort of thing. You know the type.

Those people then meet in their own state in December and vote on a ballot paper, with each voting once for president and once for vice-president. Strictly speaking, they are supposed to vote as instructed by the popular vote in their state, though over the years, there have been very small numbers who have gone rogue, and voted for someone who didn’t even run for president! These people are referred to as ‘faithless electors’. But this has happened on so few occasions that it is not considered a serious issue.

So, across all the states, the Electoral College members vote and then their votes are sent to Washington DC. The House of Representatives and the Senate, meeting in joint session, meet on January 6th to literally receive these votes, where they are read out and are formally certified by the two houses sitting together. The members certify the votes and the person who has more than 270 votes is declared the president. It has always been a fairly routine ceremonial process – until 2021. Next week, we will look at what happened then, and what it might mean for how events unfold this time around.