How is the American President elected?

Question

Asked: October 24, 20212021-10-24T22:58:53+05:30 2021-10-24T22:58:53+05:30In: GENERAL

How the US counts its votes in the presidential election?

[Deleted User] · Answer 1 · 2021-10-24T23:05:58+05:30

Context:

Let’s take a look at how the world’s oldest democracy counts its votes.

There are five main steps to electing a President:
- Primaries and Caucuses
- National Conventions
- Election Campaigning
- General Election
- Electoral College
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.

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.
Candidates can 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.

In the US, all elections — federal, state, and local — are directly organized 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.

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 and Vice President of India, to Parliament, and to the state Assemblies and Legislative Councils.
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 through practices 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.