Approximately 186.5 million Americans are eligible to vote in the November 5 election to choose the 47th president of the United States.
It’s not just presidential elections that are on the ballot. Americans will also elect people to hold various federal, state, and local offices.
In federal elections, voters choose the president and members of the House of Representatives and the Senate, which make up the U.S. Congress.
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US House of Representatives
Voters in 50 states elect members of the House of Representatives. There are a total of 435 seats, and each seat is up for election every two years.
The number of House seats allocated to each state is determined by its population, so if a state loses or gains residents in the census, that state loses or gains seats in the House.
There are six non-voting members of the U.S. House of Representatives (called delegates or resident committee members in the case of Puerto Rico) who represent U.S. territories. They do not have the right to vote on bills, but they have privileges in the chamber and can participate in certain other House events.
The six regions are:
District of Columbia Puerto Rico American Samoa Guam Northern Mariana Islands U.S. Virgin Islands.
Delegates are elected every two years, like the rest of the House of Representatives, with the exception of Puerto Rico, whose representative is elected every four years.
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us senate
Thirty-three seats, or about one-third of the 100-member Senate, are up for grabs this year, with one seat up for grabs in a special election.
Each state receives equal representation in the Senate, with two seats each. It does not depend on population size like the House of Representatives.
There are currently 49 Republicans, 47 Democrats, and 4 independents in the Senate, who caucus with the Democrats.
Bernie Sanders (Vermont) Angus King (Maine) Joe Manchin (West Virginia) Kyrsten Sinema (Arizona)
The Vice President is the President of the United States Senate. This role includes presiding over Senate sessions and casting tie-breaking votes. In addition to voting on the bill, the Senate must approve the president’s appointments to Cabinet members, Supreme Court justices, other federal judges, and ambassadors.
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Eight of the Senate races are expected to be close.
Montana Wisconsin Ohio Nevada Pennsylvania Michigan Arizona Texas
Seven of these eight seats are currently held by Democrats. Only one race for a Republican-held seat is considered a toss-up.
Ultimately, the party that controls Congress will control the ability to pass legislation. And that can either help or destroy the next president’s policies.
governor race
Voters in 11 states and two territories (Puerto Rico and American Samoa) also elect governors.
American Samoa Delaware Indiana Missouri Montana New Hampshire North Carolina North Dakota Puerto Rico Utah Vermont Washington West Virginia (Al Jazeera)
What is the Electoral College?
In the United States, the president and vice president are not directly chosen by voters.
When voters choose these offices on their ballot, they are actually voting for the slate of electors that represent their state. After the votes are counted and certified, these electors pledge to vote for the presidential and vice presidential candidates.
These electors cast their votes to determine the president and vice president at the Electoral College meeting in December. This year, voting will take place on December 17th.
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In 48 states, the presidential candidate with the most votes wins all of that state’s electors, but the winner-take-all system does not apply in Maine and Nebraska.
These two states allocate electors based on a more complex system that reflects popular votes at the state and congressional district levels. Therefore, the Electoral College votes could be split.
The number of electors in each state is equal to the number of representatives in the House plus 2, the number of senators in each state.
For example, California receives 54 Electoral College votes. This equates to two senators and 52 members of the House of Representatives.
There are a total of 538 electors, 535 from each of the 50 states and three from the District of Columbia, which is the federal capital.
Before elections, political parties in each state choose their electoral rolls. Voters are most often party officials or supporters.
Under this system, there is no guarantee that the candidate who wins the popular vote will actually win the White House.
A recent example is in 2016, when Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but lost the electoral vote to Republican Donald Trump. Her victory was boosted by wins in key battleground states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin) where opinion polls had predicted Clinton’s favor.
There is also the possibility of “faithful electors,” as in 2016, when seven electors voted for candidates other than the one who won the state’s votes.
Five of the electors were disloyal to Clinton and two were disloyal to Trump. One Democratic elector voted for Sen. Bernie Sanders over Mr. Clinton.
A 2020 Supreme Court ruling rejected the idea that electors can exercise discretion over the candidates they support. The court sided with courts in Washington and Colorado that have imposed penalties on faithless electors.
What are battleground states?
Most states clearly lean either Democratic or Republican, making the outcome of the election almost a foregone conclusion.
But every four years, several states have close races between the two leading presidential candidates. These are known as battleground states, battleground states, or battleground states. Candidates disproportionately focus their campaigns on these states.
Election analysts consider these states to be battlegrounds if polls show their margin of victory is less than 5 percentage points.
The seven battleground states expected to determine the outcome of the 2024 election are:
Arizona – 11 electoral votes Georgia – 16 electoral votes Michigan – 15 electoral votes Nevada – 6 electoral votes North Carolina – 16 electoral votes Pennsylvania – 19 electoral votes Wisconsin – 10 electoral votes
Early voting has begun in 25 states. Of these, Utah, Vermont, and Washington state only allow early voting by mail.
As of Monday, more than 42.9 million Americans had already voted in-person early or by mail.
As of Sunday, Harris had a 1.4 point lead, according to an average of national polls compiled by the website FiveThirtyEight.
Polls show the presidential race is even closer in battleground states. Trump and Harris are virtually tied in Wisconsin, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Michigan. President Trump holds a lead in North Carolina by a percentage point. The former president also has a lead in Georgia and Arizona, but the difference between Trump and Harris is within the poll’s margin of error.
According to FiveThirtyEight, the election map as of Sunday looks like this:
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What is the turnout?
Voter turnout in recent US presidential elections has hovered around 60%. Turnout in 2016 was 60.1 percent of eligible voters, up from 58.6 percent in 2012 but down from 61.6 percent in 2008.
The 2020 presidential election had the highest turnout in more than a century at 66.6%. In a closely contested election, Joe Biden won the most votes for a presidential candidate in U.S. history with 81,283,501 votes, while Trump won the election with 74,223,975 votes, the highest of any Republican candidate. I won. More than 100 million people, or two-thirds of all voters, cast early votes in the election campaign, which was held amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
(Al Jazeera)
