In November, 2024 one of the world’s celebrated democracies will be heading to the polls to elect a president. US elections obviously compete with nothing for attention, it is almost always the mainstay of political conversation every four years.
This should not surprise any of us because the US is the leader of the free world whose foreign policy dominates every episode of the world system. Therefore, the person who is elected to lead the US to a large extent has an overwhelming effect on the foreign policy they churn out as a country. For this and many other contending reasons, there is always a cause to be interested in a US election.
Having indicated the above, I believe there are very important areas of the US electoral system that require further explanation and appreciation. This writeup is set out to throw light on the electoral system of the US for us to better appreciate. So I will in the following do that however not claiming full knowledge of the US electoral system inside out.
The US has what they call ‘ordinary voters’ and the ‘electoral college’ system . This confuses a lot of people I believe . Until I did some reading on it, it also used to confuse me, so you are not in this alone. I will explain some of these things as we take a roller-coaster ride to the US.
The ‘ordinary voters’ are citizens of the US who are qualified to vote under their constitution. So just like we do in Ghana, citizens in the US also go to the polls to vote in their numbers . They call this popular vote. Unlike Ghana and other democracies, in the US it is not just the ‘popular vote’ that will get a US presidential candidate to the white house(their seat of government), but their ‘electoral college’.
The electoral college is made of 538 people who they call ‘electors’ drawn from the 50 states of the US who are seized with the authority to get a US president to the oval office. To make up the 538 electors (electoral college) , every state has a number of electors they contribute. States do not have the same number of electors. some have more than the others based on the population of a state. In actual fact, it is the two senate seats (remember every state has two senators) and the number of representatives from that state who are in the lower house that is used to determine the number of electors in each state. So states with more lower house members will ordinarily have more electors.
The state of California has the most number of electors, 55 of them while states like Wyoming, Alaska, North Dakota and the District of Columbia (Washington DC) have the least number of electors. So even with winning a popular vote in a US election does not give you a carte blanche pass to the white house like we have in Ghana. You however will need more than half (270) of the votes of the 538 electors of the electoral college to give you that pass. This makes popular voters invariably indirect voters of the 538 electors. A somewhat complex system but understandable I believe.
The meat of the matter is to know how the electoral college system operates, and where it strikes chord with the ‘popular vote’ to deliver a president of the United States (POTUS) . I will explain that. To start with, popular voters from every state vote for the presidential candidate of their choice like we do in Ghana. Votes are then collated in a state to state basis and parties get to know the votes they have gotten from each state.
The percentage of the popular votes a party gets from a particular state determines the number of electoral college votes that party gets in that state. In some states, the electoral college votes are directly proportional to the number of popular votes a party gets in that state but in other states, a party gets all the electoral college votes in that state if that party is able to lock down 50.1% popular votes in that state.
The former of this scenario which is based on proportional representation only applies to the states of Nebraska and Maine while the latter of the two scenarios which is based on getting 50.1% of the popular votes and getting all the electoral college votes , applies to the rest of the states except Nebraska and Maine as already stated. So as a candidate wins the popular votes from every state he/she is getting closer to the 270 electoral college votes that the candidate will need to clinch a victory.
To add to this, it is however possible to have more popular votes in an election but may not get the required number of electoral college votes that will give you victory. This is because a candidate can do well by way of popular votes in states that may not give you much electoral college votes but will perform poorly in college voter rich states like California.
So the target is working towards the two; popular votes and college votes. In recent US history, both President Bush and president Trump in 2000 and 2016 respectively trailed in popular votes but won the electoral college votes. A bit unfair isn’t it? But according to the promoters of this system, shepherding a post-independence America required a system like this to have the buy-in of all the states in elections since just the popular votes couldn’t guarantee the participation of every state at the time. We can deal with this some other day. It is however important to add that there is a raging debate for and against this system positing its unfairness or otherwise.
In a nutshell, the US has two complex layers of systems working in sync to deliver a president. That is the ‘ordinary voters’ and the ‘electoral college system’. As already explained, you will need these two working in concert rather than across purposes in electing the commander in chief . I believe this explanation paints a clearer picture of the US electoral system now.
Source : Konlan Blaise Yennulom
International Relations/Security Analyst
