US Elections: Follow Results – Updated Live

Follow all the US elections in real time on our interactive map. Click the buttons at the top to choose the contest you want to follow, such as the Presidency, Congress, and Senate. Then click on a state or even a county to get a more detailed breakdown of the results.

Follow the race of the United States Congress in real time here. All 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 of the 100 seats in the Senate are up for re-election.

Will Donald Trump defeat Joe Biden to win a second term in the White House? Everything we know about the 2020 presidential election so far.

The 2020 U.S. elections are finally here. But the coronavirus pandemic has thrown many aspects of the race into uncertainty.

The virus has already drastically affected the course of the elections, including the chaos caused by Donald Trump’s Covid-19 diagnosis.

It’s also unclear what Election Day will look like, given the risk of contracting the virus by voting in person.

A record number of people have already cast their votes by mail. Election experts suggest that this could mean that the result might not be declared on election night, but could take several days, or even weeks, to appear.

With the coronavirus pandemic expected to affect public life well into next year, the 2020 election is likely to go down in history as one of the least conventional US presidential races ever held.

Despite the uncertainty, some aspects of the electoral process are enshrined in the US constitution.

Here’s what we know about how the race will unfold.

The American elections in a nutshell

US presidential elections are always held on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November.

Americans vote for people called “electors” in their state who support the candidate they want to become president; This process is called an electoral college.

The more people live in a state, the more voters there are for that state. So California, for example, with a population of 38.8 million, has 55 votes; Delaware, (population 936,000), has just three.

There are 538 voters in total, corresponding to the 435 Representatives (male and female in Congress) and 100 senators, plus three additional voters from the District of Columbia. The Constitution prohibits any federal official, elected or appointed, from being an elector.

The candidate with the most electors wins all the votes in the state electoral college and the first candidate to win enough states to reach 270 electoral votes is elected president.

How does the electoral college work?

The 50 US states and Washington DC have a fixed number of “electors” in the electoral college, roughly proportional to the size of each state.

Each state gets at least three electoral votes because the number equals its total number of senators and representatives in the United States Congress. Washington DC also gets three votes from the Electoral College, which means that a total of 538 voters make up the Electoral College.

California, the largest state, has 55 electoral votes, Texas, the next largest, gets 38. New York and Florida have 29 each.

All except Maine and Nebraska use a winner-take-all system, so if you win the most votes in a state, you get the entire number of electoral college votes.

To become president, either candidate must win a majority of 538 voters, or 270 voters.

Although the Constitution does not dictate that voters follow the popular vote, many states in the United States have laws that require them to do so. These laws have been challenged by voters who vote for someone else on occasion, but in July, the US Supreme Court ruled that voters must follow the popular vote in states that have such a law.

The electoral college system generally reflects the popular vote: Presidents won the electoral vote and lost the popular vote only five times in American history. The most recent case was in 2016, when Donald Trump won the electoral college but Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent, won the popular vote.

Who can become president?

The President of the United States can be a man or woman of any race or religion, but must:

• Be at least 35 years old
• Be born in the USA.
• Have lived in the US for at least 14 years.

The rules also state that a person can be on the job for a maximum of two terms. (The only exception to this was Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was elected to a special third term at the height of World War II.)

How does voting work in US elections?

The vote in the presidential election is a simple choice between candidates from the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. Occasionally, a third-party candidate will be in the race, like Kanye West this year, but it’s pretty rare for them to gain traction or have a significant impact.

The two main political parties hold primaries and caucuses across the country during an election year to select who they want to represent them on the ballot.

Democratic and Republican candidates are then selected and formally announced during their party’s summer conventions.

The US electoral system itself is far from simple. This is because when America’s founding fathers created the system in 1787, there was no way a presidential candidate could mount a national campaign, and there was little in the way of national identity.

The founding fathers chose not to elect US presidents by direct popular vote for fear that the largest and most populous states could play an outsize role in deciding the winner.

The elector system, loosely based on the selection of the Pope by the Roman Catholic College of Cardinals, was chosen on the theory that the most informed and informed people in each state would select a president on merit, regardless of loyalties. state.

So when Americans cast their vote on November 3, they technically vote for “electors,” not the candidates themselves. Voters are state officials or important party figures, but are generally not named on the ballot.

Each elector casts a vote after the general election for one of the two candidates. The newly elected president and vice president will take office on January 20, 2021.