[ad_1]
The world’s attention is focused on the election day that will take place on November 3 in the United States. Donald trump, Republican party candidate, and Joe biden, candidate of the Democratic party, seek to win the elections for the White House. However, the campaigns are not only aimed at winning the popular vote.
Unlike the democratic system of direct election such as Colombia, in which citizens of the entire national territory elect the president of the republic with their vote, the electoral mechanism of the United States passes through intermediaries and state counts.
The US constitution established a method of indirect popular election, which seeks to respond to its characteristic of a federal state and guarantee that small states, or those with low population density, have representation in electoral processes.
For this, the figure of the Electoral College was formed, in which citizens do not vote for the candidates for the presidency, but for delegates from each state who, representing the electoral will of their territories, participate in a final election in which by majorities the president and vice president are elected.
Another peculiarity of this mechanism is that the quotas that each state has in the group of final voters are not distributed proportionally to the votes that each campaign receives in the state count. In 48 of the 50 states and in the District of Washington, the campaign that receives the most votes wins all seats in the Electoral College.
This forces the parties to focus their efforts on the states with the largest number of voters. In the video that opens this note you can learn in detail how the Electoral College quotas are distributed and how they are disputed at the polls.
Presidents who have lost the popular vote but won the presidency
In the recent history of the North American country, two men have been elected as leaders despite having received fewer votes than their rivals at the polls.
In 2016 Donal Trump became president despite the fact that his rival at the time, Hillary clinton, obtained more votes from the citizens. The Democratic candidate had about 2.8 million more votes than the current president, despite this she only obtained 227 electoral votes while Trump reached 304.
Another case occurred in 2000, when George W. Bush he defeated Al Gore in the electoral contest in a tight election. Florida was the decisive state in that contest.
[ad_2]
