I’d imagine you already know this, but if we’re writing about elections, we might as well make sure we define the lingo, so here is how a Presidential Election works.In the United States, for the Presidential Vote, you do not go by popular election. There are a number of ways to run an election, and the one that we choose is called an Electoral College.Each country has its own rules for elections, and how a president/prime minister is chosen is run according to that. For example, in most Parliamentary models, individual candidates are not voted for. You vote for the Party you most agree with, and, in proportion to how many votes that party gets, seats are given out in the Parliament. The leading party then gets to choose who their main representative is.In other countries, it’s done on a straight-up popular vote. The percentage a candidate has to win by is often fixed, so say, for example, 5 candidates are running for president, and the person with the greatest number of votes only gets 30% of the national vote. If, say, this country has a rule that the president must have 50% or more of the vote, they will then go into a run off election, in which they will take off the bottom two candidates and say, you didn’t get enough votes, and then hold an election to choose from the top three candidates. The process continues until someone gets 50% or more of the vote.This isn’t how the American Presidency works. The American presidential election is based off of a system of Electoral Votes, which are handed out to each state in accordance to how many representatives they have within Congress. So the amount of electoral votes you get is based off of your states population. If you live in California, your state has a high population, so you get 55 electoral votes, 53 for each of the representatives and 2 for each of the Senators. If you’re living in Wyoming, you’re only going to get 3 electors, because you only have one representative and two Senators. Washington, D.C., not represented in Congress, gets 3 electoral votes.Now technically, for each electoral vote, there is an elector who is given that vote. The laws for who that person has to vote for vary from state to state, but usually, if the popular majority of a state votes for a candidate, every electoral vote in that state will go to the candidate the state voted for. So if the people of California vote for one candidate over the other by a single vote, the winning candidate gets ALL 55 of those electoral votes, rather than a proportionate amount. It is not unheard of for a President to lose the popular vote but win the election because of the mechanics of the electoral college. Some states have laws that give electoral votes to whatever candidate wins a specific district. For example, Barack Obama was given one of Nebraska’s electoral votes in 2008 for winning the 2nd Congressional District, even though John McCain won the state.Sometimes, an elector will vote for another candidate than they are supposed to according to the popular vote, or they’ll refuse to cast a ballot. This is not illegal on a federal level, but about half the states have punishments in law for these so-called “Faithless Electors.” These electors have not, to date, changed the outcome of an election. The apportionment of electors is a legal matter left up to state governments.ContingenciesThe required number of electoral votes to win is a simple majority, which, currently, is 270 electoral votes. If a candidate does not receive the majority of votes, it goes to the House of Representatives. Only the top three electoral vote getters go to the House, and once there, each state’s representatives must vote as a single unit for the President. Whoever gets 26 of the states’ votes wins. The Vice President is elected in the same manner by the Senate, in the case of a deadlock.If there is a deadlock, the Vice President Elect becomes president upon inauguration day, until a President is chosen, and if there’s no VP Elect, the spot goes to the Speaker of the House.Swing StatesIn modern politics, there are states that tend to vote for a particular party in a given Presidential election. It’s almost a given that the Democratic Candidate is going to win California, and it’s usually a given that the Republican will win Kansas or Texas. In fact, most states consistently fall along these partisan lines. The Republicans tend to win the more sparsely populated and Southern States, where as the Democrats win on the coasts and in the urban centers.There are states, however, that are more or less a coin toss in terms of the demographics of the Electorate. These states are usually where the candidates spend most of their time, and geographically, tend to be in the Midwest. Swing States can change from year to year, and it’s usually through the projections of pollsters that Swing States are decided. Florida and Ohio are the two most notorious Swing States, as they have significant amounts of Electoral votes and tend to be up for grabs each year. Usually, the safe states are about even, so the election will usually come down to the swing states.For the 2012 election, it’s relatively safe to bet that the swing states will be the same as they were in the 2008 election, since Obama will likely be running against a candidate with similar viewpoints to John McCain. If this is the case, the states to keep an eye on are (in order of electoral votes): Florida, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, Virdinia, Missouri, Indiana, and Montana (Pennsylvania was considered a swing state during the election, but Obama won by a relatively large margin, so it is not designated as such). This COULD shift, depending on Obama’s performance and the popularity of the Republican candidate, but expect to see Florida and Ohio playing a major role in the 2012 elections.For this reason, people who have residency in two states may choose to register as voters in the state that is considered a swing state rather than the safe state, for the purpose of having a greater influence on the outcome of
