Please enable JavaScript in your web browser; otherwise some parts of this site might not work properly. In other U. But the president and vice president are not elected directly by citizens. The process of using electors comes from the Constitution. It was a compromise between a popular vote by citizens and a vote in Congress.
Each state gets as many electors as it has members of Congress House and Senate. Including Washington, D. Who is chosen to be an elector, how, and when varies by state. After you cast your ballot for president, your vote goes to a statewide tally. In 48 states and Washington, D. Maine and Nebraska assign their electors using a proportional system. A candidate needs the vote of at least electors—more than half of all electors—to win the presidential election. In most cases, a projected winner is announced on election night in November after you vote.
But the actual Electoral College vote takes place in mid-December when the electors meet in their states.
See the Electoral College timeline of events for the election. The rare elector who votes for someone else may be fined, disqualified and replaced by a substitute elector, or potentially even prosecuted. It is possible to win the Electoral College but lose the popular vote.
This happened in , in , and three times in the s. If no candidate receives the majority of electoral votes , the vote goes to the House of Representatives. House members choose the new president from among the top three candidates. The Senate elects the vice president from the remaining top two candidates. This has only happened once. The Electoral College process is in the U. It would take a constitutional amendment to change the process.
For more information, contact your U. Lots of people dream of becoming President of the United States. But to officially run for office, a person needs to meet three basic requirements established by the U. Constitution Article 2, Section 1. People with similar ideas usually belong to the same political party. The two main parties in the U. Many people want to be President. In caucuses, party members meet, discuss, and vote for who they think would be the best party candidate.
In primaries, party members vote in a state election for the candidate they want to represent them in the general election. After the primaries and caucuses, each major party, Democrat and Republican, holds a national convention to select a Presidential nominee.
The Presidential candidates campaign throughout the country to win the support of the general population. When people cast their vote, they are actually voting for a group of people called electors.
The number of electors each state gets is equal to its total number of Senators and Representatives in Congress. A total of electors form the Electoral College. Each elector casts one vote following the general election. The candidate who gets votes or more wins. An election for president of the United States happens every four years on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. The most recent presidential election was November 3, The election process begins with primary elections and caucuses.
These are two methods that states use to select a potential presidential nominee Nominee: the final candidate chosen by a party to represent them in an election.
In general, primaries use secret ballots for voting. Caucuses are local gatherings of voters who vote at the end of the meeting for a particular candidate. Then it moves to nominating conventions , during which political parties each select a nominee to unite behind. During a political party convention, each presidential nominee also announces a vice presidential running mate.
Each state gets as many electors as it has lawmakers in the US Congress representatives in the House and senators. California has the most electors - 55 - while a handful of sparsely populated states like Wyoming, Alaska and North Dakota and Washington DC have the minimum of three.
Each elector represents one electoral vote, and a candidate needs to gain a majority of the votes - or more - to win the presidency. Generally, states award all their electoral college votes to whoever won the poll of ordinary voters in the state.
For example, if a candidate wins Alternatively, a candidate could win by a landslide and still pick up the same number of electoral votes. It's therefore possible for a candidate to become president by winning a number of tight races in certain states, despite having fewer votes across the country.
There are only two states Maine and Nebraska which divide up their electoral college votes according to the proportion of votes each candidate receives. This is why presidential candidates target specific "swing states" - states where the vote could go either way - rather than trying to win over as many voters as possible across the country. Every state they win gets them closer to the electoral college votes they need. What information do we collect from this quiz?
Privacy notice. In fact, two out of the last five elections were won by candidates who had fewer votes from the general public than their rivals. It is possible for candidates to be the most popular candidate among voters nationally, but still fail to win enough states to gain electoral votes.
In , Donald Trump had almost three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, but won the presidency because the electoral college gave him a majority. In , George W Bush won with electoral votes, although Democrat candidate Al Gore won the popular vote by more than half a million. Only three other presidents have been elected without winning the popular vote, all of them in the 19th Century: John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B Hayes and Benjamin Harrison.
When the US constitution was being drawn up in , a national popular vote to elect a president was practically impossible. This was because of the size of the country and the difficulty of communication. At the same time, there was little enthusiasm for allowing the president to be chosen by lawmakers in the capital, Washington DC. So, the framers of the constitution created the electoral college, with each state choosing electors. Smaller states favoured the system as it gave them more of a voice than a nationwide popular vote to decide the president.
The electoral college was also favoured by southern states, where slaves made up a large portion of the population.
Even though slaves didn't vote, they were counted in the US census as three-fifths of a person. Since the number of electoral votes was determined by the size of a state's population, southern states had more influence in electing a president than a direct public vote would have given them. In some states, electors could vote for whichever candidate they prefer, regardless of who voters backed.
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