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What date is the 2020 U.S. election?
The election will be held on Tuesday, November 3.
Donald Trump had floated back, in a tweet suggesting changes to the rules that make it easier for voters to use postal ballots in many states could lead to a “rigged election.”
Trump has argued that, despite having used it himself in the past, voting by mail is more exposed to fraud. Most election experts have questioned whether voting by mail could lead to widespread fraud, as Trump claims, but they have pointed out that an anticipated increase in voting by mail could cause problems.
The date of the election is not written in the US Constitution, so a delay is technically possible, but the Constitution does describe a date for the newly elected president’s inauguration in January.
However, the power to reschedule elections rests with the United States Congress, and Democrats have a majority in one chamber, the House of Representatives, making it highly unlikely that a delay will pass.
Read more: Joe Biden vs Hillary Clinton: How the polls compare in the week before the US elections
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, while Delaware, (population of 936,000), has only three votes.
There are currently 538 electors in total, corresponding to the 435 Representatives (congressmen and women) and 100 senators, plus the three additional electors 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 but two states, Maine and Nebraska, use a winner-take-all system, so if you get 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.
While the Constitution does not dictate that voters follow the popular vote, many US states have laws that require them to do so. These laws have been challenged by voters who voted for someone else on occasion, but in July, the US Supreme Court ruled that voters must follow the popular vote in states that have passed the 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.
