‘How the US counts its votes in the presidential election’

Published: 7th Nov, 2020

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?

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.

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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