The Electoral College and US Elections explained

Today is election day in the US, a momentous day for democracy that has been designated to be held back in 1845, when the country was chiefly an agrarian society, during the brief pause after harvest season and before the threat of winter.

A record turnout of voters is now expected to choose whether to re-elect populist Republican Donald Trump or to install as the new executive former vice president, Democrat Joe Biden.

But vastly unlike the Philippines, the winner of the US presidential elections is not done through the number of individual votes or known as the "popular vote." Rather, the winner is chosen through a majority of what is called the electoral vote, which is cast by the set number of electors across the country’s states.

How can a presidential nominee win?
The magic number that a candidate must win in order to secure the seat of the chief executive is 270, which is half plus one out of the total 538 number of electors representing 50 US states plus three for the federal capital District of Columbia, where the country’s capital is located. Unlike our election system in the Philippines, the president and vice president are voted as one by the elector in a state, meaning one can’t have a president and vice president from different parties as electors vote along party lines.

Is everything based on the electoral votes?
The popular vote will be the basis for determining the winner of the presidential and vice presidential elections. But the number of popular votes will be used for the election of Congress, mayors, governors, state legislators, and a slate of other local officials. Up for grabs today at the ballot box will be 435 seats in the House of Representatives, 35 of the 200 Senate seats, 13 state governors, as well as other local officials.

How does the United States Electoral College work? 
The US electoral college system, which has equal representation across states equivalent to their number of representatives in Congress, means that the vote of electors in small states have equal weight versus those in large and densely populous states. This unique system is what gives rise to instances where a candidate can win the popular vote—meaning the most number of individual votes—but lose in the electoral vote, which was how Trump beat Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016, who won the popular vote by about 3 million votes after lopsided wins in large states like California and New York.

In 2000, Al Gore also won the popular vote, but lost the electoral vote following a recount in Florida that was settled in the Supreme Court. The two recent cases of the electoral vote trouncing the popular vote at the expense of the Democratic nominee only showed the traditional edge of the conservative Republican party in frontier sparsely populated areas over large urbanized districts that are the usual stronghold of the Democratic party.

Could students enroll at the Electoral College? And why such a seemingly complicated system in the first place?
The electoral voting system flows from an entity called the United States Electoral College, which is not an actual college with an educational mandate. The Electoral College is a collegial body of electors elected every four years, restricted to individuals who are not members of Congress or a high-ranking US official in a position of trust or profit. The job of an elector is simply to choose the president and vice president of his or her party.

The Electoral College was put in place by the delegates of the 1787 Constitutional Convention as a compromise between those clamoring to have the chief executive elected by Congress and those favoring a popular vote system. The Electoral College was a workaround that untangled months of thorny discussion between parties arguing that giving Congress the power to pick the chief executive would only breed crony corruption between the two branches of government, and those saying that the popular vote would unduly give too much power to large densely populated states and in turn marginalize other less populated states.

The Electoral College system means that when individuals cast their vote for the president, they are in effect not voting for the president but the elector of their preferred candidate. 

In all but two states, states give all their electoral college votes to whoever wins the popular vote, regardless of the margin of victory. Ultimately, the winner-take-all set-up has been likened to tennis, where a player must win sets—in this case a state—regardless of how many points is racked up.

How did some vote early?
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a record number of voters opted to cast their vote early, or about 94 million accounting already for two-thirds of the 2016 total turnout. Of the total early voters, nearly 60 million reportedly was cast through mail-in voting, where voters send in their ballots to the polling centers through the US Postal Service. Democrats are believed to have the edge over mail-in ballots, as many rural voters are said to prefer in-person voting on election day.

What are “battleground states”? And where are they?
Many results in various states are already a foregone conclusion as these areas have entrenched loyalties to either of the two parties. This means that attention, and campaign time, have mostly been devoted to what are called “battleground states,” unpredictable areas where it could swing either to the Republican or Democratic party on election day. These contentious swing states that pundits are keeping tabs on include Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.

Special focus is given to traditionally Democratic states that Trump managed to wrest from Clinton in the 2016 elections -- Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin -- which could prove vital to securing the much-coveted magic number of 270.