‘How the US counts its votes in the presidential election’
- Category
International Relations
- Published
10th Nov, 2020
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Let’s take a look at how the world’s oldest democracy counts their votes.
Context
Let’s take a look at how the world’s oldest democracy counts their votes.
About
How is the American President elected?
- There are five main steps to electing a President:
- Primaries and Caucuses
- National Conventions
- Election Campaigning
- General Election
- Electoral College
- Forty-eight states, plus the District of Columbia, have a winner-takes-all approach to their Electoral College votes.
- This means that on election day whoever wins the popular vote by even a single vote, wins all of the state's electoral votes.
- It therefore does not matter by how many votes the candidates win in each state, as long as they win more than the next person.

Who actually elected the President?
- US voters have no constitutional right to vote for the president or his running mate.
- In the US Election process, voters merely indicate a preference, but the task of actually electing the president falls to these 538 individual electors to the US Electoral College.
- It is possible for candidates to be the most popular candidate among voters and still fail to win enough states to gain majority electoral votes.
- In practice, electors almost always vote for the candidate who wins the popular vote.
For example
- If an elector votes against their state's presidential pick, they become "faithless".
- This happened in the 2016 race when seven electoral college votes were cast this way, but the results weren't affected by the faithless electors.
- In 2016, Donald Trump had almost three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, but won the presidency because the electoral college gave him a majority.
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How are elections supervised in the US?
- In the US, all elections — federal, state, and local — are directly organised by the ruling governments of individual states.
- The US Constitution and laws grant the states wide latitude in how they administer elections, resulting in varying rules across the country.
- In many US states, the responsibility of conducting elections falls on the state’s secretary of state — a politician who in some states is directly elected and in others appointed by the state governor.
How is the election process different from India?
- In India, the Constitution under Article 324 provides for a separate rule-making Election Commission that is independent of the executive in government.
- Set up in 1950, it is charged with the responsibility of conducting polls to the offices of the President In India, the ECI has been devised as an apolitical body — a key priority of the country’s founding leaders.
- So, US states vary widely when it comes to key electoral practices such as vote counting, postal voting and drawing constituencies.
- Often, individual states are accused of providing an unfair advantage to one political party throughpractices such as gerrymandering
- During the Jim Crow era (late 19th century-early 20th century), states in the American South actively disenfranchised Black people– a practice that was largely curbed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
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