You don’t have to be American to be caught up in the US presidential elections. Ever since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, newspapers, magazines, and electronic media contain daily news items related to the elections.
In most competitions, the person or team who scores the most points is declared the winner.
Not so in the American presidential election system, where the final outcome depends on the Electoral College, which was formed in 1787.
The thinking behind it was to allow smaller states to have some influence in the choice of president and to avoid giving the larger states too much power.
To this non-American, it sounds fairly logical, though it’s not fair – as we saw in 2016, the first time Donald Trump ran for president.
His rival then was Hillary Clinton, who won the popular vote with 65,853,514, compared to 62,984,828 for Trump. But the Electoral College gave 304 votes to Trump and 227 to Clinton.
In 2020, Biden received 7 million more votes than Trump, scoring 81,283,501 to 74,223,975. The Electoral College gave him 306 votes and 232 to Trump.
While the system enabled Trump to win in 2016, even though he technically lost, in 2020, when Biden won both the popular vote and that of the Electoral College, Trump and some of his Republican cohorts cried foul and refused to accept the results.
Moreover, Trump refused to attend Biden’s inauguration. He simply could not fathom how he had been beaten by the man he called “Sleepy Joe.”
To complicate the Electoral College issue even more, there isn’t a uniform method of selecting the various state representatives. Each state has its own rules as determined by its legislature.
How does it work?
There are a total of 538 electoral votes, and each state receives the number of its votes in proportion to its representation in Congress, and not in accordance with the size of its population.
Even though the result of the popular vote does not guarantee a win to any one candidate, it does affect which party will choose its state representatives to the Electoral College.
With the exception of Maine and Nebraska, all states have a policy whereby the party of the overall winner of the statewide vote gets to appoint that state’s representatives.
In Maine and Nebraska, the winner of the popular vote in each is appointed, plus two representatives from the overall state winner.
California has the largest number of votes (54), while Vermont and Wyoming are among those that have the least number, 3. Each state has at least one member of the House of Representatives and two in the Senate, which automatically gives every state at least three votes.
The candidate who is eventually voted in as president must score an absolute majority of at least 270 out of 538 votes.
That does not mean the outcome depends on California. The votes of one of the smallest states could indirectly affect US foreign and domestic policies over the next four years.
If anything is proof that a chain is as strong as its weakest link, the American electoral system has it down pat.
It has gone through change via constitutional amendments, but perhaps the time has come for it to be abolished.