As
America decides who will officially be the country's next President,
these are some things you need to know about the electoral college votes
coming in.
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton
The 538 members of the US Electoral College meet Monday in the
capital of each of the 50 states to designate a successor to Barack
Obama as president of the United States.
A candidate must obtain an absolute majority of the vote — or 270 of the 538 –– to claim the presidency.
Why an Electoral College?
The system originated with the US Constitution in 1787. It
establishes the rules for indirect, single-round presidential elections
by universal suffrage (not entirely universal: blacks and women could
not vote at the time).
The country’s Founding Fathers saw this as a compromise between
direct presidential elections with universal suffrage, and an election
by members of Congress — an approach rejected as insufficiently
democratic.
Since then, hundreds of amendments have been proposed to Congress
in efforts to modify or do away with the Electoral College, but none has
succeeded.
Who are the electors?
There are 538 in all.
Most are local elected officials or local party leaders, but their
names do not appear on ballots, and their identities are almost entirely
unknown to the general public.
Each state has as many electors as it has members in the House of
Representatives (a number dependent on the state’s population) and in
the Senate (two in every state, regardless of size).
Populous California, for example, has 55 electors; Texas has 38;
and sparsely populated Vermont, Alaska, Wyoming and Delaware have only
three each, as does the District of Columbia.
The Constitution leaves it to the states to decide how their
electors’ votes should be cast. In every state but two (Nebraska and
Maine), the candidate winning the majority of popular votes
theoretically wins all the state’s electors.
Why are they in the spotlight this year?
In the November 8 election, Donald Trump won a majority of electors
(306 of the 538), but his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton won the
popular vote by a margin of nearly three million.
While this situation is not unprecedented (see George W. Bush’s
victory over Al Gore in 2000), this year’s particularly nasty election
campaign exacerbated the tensions and ill will over the outcome.
Millions of Americans who consider Donald Trump unfit to occupy the
Oval Office have signed an online petition calling for Republican
electors to block his election. Thirty-seven of them would have to do so
to prevent the real estate mogul from being elected.
The Republican camp, for its part, has denounced this as a
desperate attempt by bitter Democratic militants unable to accept
defeat, and has complained that some electors have been badgered and
harassed ahead of the Monday vote.
Is it a real vote or a simple formality?
Nothing in the constitution or in federal law requires electors to vote one way or another.
Laws in some states do require electors to respect the popular vote
(the so-called “faithless electors” who defy the popular vote generally
face a simple fine), while other states impose no such requirement.
History shows that it is extremely rare for an elector to defy the expressed will of his or her state’s voters.
While a few have done so, they have never changed the final choice of the person to occupy the White House for a four-year term.
When will results be announced?
While Electoral College members vote on Monday, the states have
until December 28 to transmit their “Certificates of Vote” to the
Congress and the National Archives in Washington, which will then
immediately post them online.
The formal announcement of the name of the next president will be made by the Congress on January 6.
***
- The Punch
When News Breaks Out, We Break In. (The 2014 Bloggies Finalist)
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