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Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump remain locked in a dead heat in national and battleground state polls, with all eyes on who will clinch the Electoral College.
Here is what to know about the process this Election Day.What is the Electoral College?
As laid out in Article II of the Constitution, the president of the United States is elected by the Electoral College — not the popular vote.
Under the system, each state is allocated a number of electoral votes determined by the size of its congressional delegation. The states with the largest number of electoral votes include California (54) and Texas (40).
Experts said the founders debated who should be trusted to choose the nation’s leader, with some urging Congress or state legislatures to decide and others advocating for a more democratic vote.
«When they designed our system, they came up with the Electoral College not because they thought it was perfect but as a way to get the Constitution passed, and it satisfied the concerns of both the very populous states and lower populous states», Rachael Cobb, a political science professor at Suffolk University, .
Though it’s not a direct election of the president, they noted.
«It’s really 51 separate elections», Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, . «Every state and the District of Columbia has its own rules for running the election. Then each state awards its electors separately, and it’s up to candidates to win a majority of those electors to be elected president.»How do electors work?
To win the presidential election, a candidate needs to capture 270 of the 538 total electoral votes.
Many states have a winner-takes-all approach, meaning that whichever candidate wins the most votes statewide receives all its electoral votes. Two states, however, split their electoral votes: Nebraska allocates three of its five electoral votes by district and Maine allocates two of its four votes by district.
Electors are usually selected by the state’s political parties.
While the Constitution doesn’t bind electors to vote for the winner of the popular vote in their state, many legislatures have laws in place to prevent an elector from rogue — or what’s called a «faithless elector.
