America's Electoral College

America has fifty states. If you are wondering why the presidential campaign is concentrating on only about seven of them, here is why.

When America holds a presidential election one thing that seems to baffle most people, inside as well as outside the country, is that a candidate can win the election without winning the popular vote.

At the time of this writing there have been six presidential elections since the turn of the Millennium. It has happened in two of the six that the winner of the election actually did not win the popular vote.

The reason is a process known as the Electoral College. The choosing of the next president is actually not done by popular vote. It is a two-step process. It is the U.S. states that cast their votes for president, not individual voters.

What happens is that each U.S. state is given a certain number of electoral votes, in proportion to it's population. The voters in the state cast their votes, and the state then casts all of it's electoral votes for the candidate that got the most votes in that state.

But this is not representative of the popular vote because the state will cast all of it's electoral votes for a candidate even if that candidate wins the vote in that state by only one vote.

That is why a candidate can win the election without winning the popular vote, and it has happened twice since the turn of the Millennium.

A fairly close election is thus decided by the "swing" states. Most states will usually vote for either one major party or the other. New York will virtually always cast it's electoral votes for the Democrat candidate just as Arizona virtually always will for the Republican candidate. But a few "swing" states, particularly Florida, might vote either way and it is these states that decide a close election.

"Swing" states are also called "battleground" states. It might seem that every state should be a "battleground" state but most states will reliably cast their vote one way or the other. A presidential election is decided in the states that don't.

What is so significant, and contentious, about America's Electoral College is that the number of electoral votes that each state gets is not in strict proportion to it's population. Smaller states actually get more electoral votes, in proportion to their populations, than do larger states.

The reasoning behind this is to force presidential candidates to pay attention to the smaller states. If not for the Electoral College, so the reasoning goes, candidates might just campaign in the major cities, ignoring the more sparsely populated agricultural states, whose views may be quite different from those of the people in the major cities.

What makes the Electoral College so controversial, at least for the relatively few people who understand it at all, is that people in major cities tend to vote Democrat, while people in rural areas are more likely to vote Republican.

This comes down to America's coasts against it's "heartland". The more populous coasts mostly votes Democrat, while the more sparsely populated agricultural states of the heartland mostly vote Republican.

Despite it's great importance in deciding presidential elections, the Electoral College is rarely discussed in America. It seems to be only people like political science students that really understand it. Neither major political party seems anxious to discuss it.

It might be expected that the Republicans don't want to remind the country that they have managed to win three of the last six presidential elections, even though they only won the popular vote in one of those elections.

Maybe the Democrats don't want to discuss how they have allowed it to go on for so long that their opponents do not even have to win the popular vote, they only have to come close, because the mysterious Electoral College makes it virtually certain that any close election will be won by the Republicans.