November 8th will be a long night for U.S. residents
watching the election returns for America’s President, Vice President, and many
state-level offices. After the last of the West Coast polls close, election
officials will determine the winning presidential candidate late Tuesday night
based on which states each candidate won.
A process called the Electoral College selects the U.S.
president by tallying the number of political representatives that are selected
per state. A total of 538 electoral votes are up for grabs among the 50 states plus
Washington D.C. Whichever political party, Democrats or Republicans, wins the
majority of 270 votes or more will be the winner.
Candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will be elected
not by the popular votes each citizen makes but by the number of electoral
votes they get. A meaning of the word “college” is a group that meets to
accomplish particular duties; that’s the function of the Electoral College.
The official decision won’t be publicized until an
anticlimactic ceremony is held during a joint session of both houses of the
U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives on January 6, 2017. Envelopes from
each state will be opened and the results of the electoral votes read aloud.
The ceremony is only a formality, established long before the beginning of mass
communication, since the results will be known on election night.
The Electoral College system began at the beginning of U.S.
presidential politics with the 13 original states or colonies. The
Constitutional Convention of 1787 established the system on September 6th of
that year. Almost 3 million people populated the country then, and that was an
important consideration by the U.S. Congress to establish a representative-type
of election process rather than a direct democratic voting system.
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| 1787 Constitutional Convention |
Attendees at the 1787 convention went back and forth with
plans to elect a president. They settled on a plan to use the state populations
in selecting electors in the same way that U.S. representatives were selected.
It was a method of addressing the way the population density of the country was
unevenly concentrated on the East Coast, where citizens in those areas could
dominate all presidential elections. They realized the population of the U.S.
was going to spread westward across the country, and future states would need
fair representation in selecting presidents.
Under the first use of the Electoral College, George
Washington began his two terms as president in 1789.
California has the greatest number of Electoral College
votes at 55. Texas is a distant second state at 38 votes. Six states and
Washington D.C. get the lowest number of three electoral votes. The states each
getting three votes are Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota,
and Vermont.
Obviously, the candidates’ managers concentrate on spending
their campaign funds in the states with high number of electoral votes. Their
goal is to win the election by getting the majority of electoral votes.
Two states (Maine and Nebraska) take exception to the
winner-take-all method of determining the number of electoral votes each state
reports and take the popular votes into consideration when selecting electoral
representatives.
Many people consider the Electoral System complicated and unnecessary. Eliminating the electoral method and using the majority of the popular votes to determine the next president gets discussed every election year. Such a change would require an amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Thank you for reading this blog. See my website at
www.joevlatino.com.
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