How the President of the U.S. is elected!

A little Story about why Arnold Schwarzenegger could never be the President of the United States of America!

 

Wait what? Why the hell could Ronald Reagan become president and Arnie can not? He even became governor of California so why not president as well? How shall we cope with this impertinence and obvious racism?
1^st Option: Let's all make signs and rage in front of the American Embassy!!! 
2^nd Option: Let's read this blog post!

Okay, now all jokes aside. Last year, as you might have followed, Barack Hussein Obama was reelected the president of the United States for another Administration (that’s the official name for the four years lasting presidential term in the US). Those elections -in my opinion- had such a remarkable presence in our media oddly, did you notice that as well? 
However, what I wondered about was, if the President of the USA gets elected the same way as we elect our president (who is currently Heinz Fischer by the way). That is, in fact, not the case, which results in me, having a topic to write about.

So, how gets the US-President elected?

Well, first of all, we need an appropriate candidate namely a natural born citizen of one of the fifty states (Barack Obama was born in Hawaii; Arnold Schwarzenegger in Thal bei Graz - not really in America, sorry Arnie), from the age of 35, who has lived in the USA for at least the past 14 years.   

To boot he must not have been the president for the last two administrations, that’s why George Bush for example wasn’t allowed to even line up in 2012 for the presidential race. Furthermore, before we may talk about the official presidential elections, it is important to declare the opponents, which are always the two major parties, the Republicans and the Democrats respectively the presidential nominees of these parties and maybe some other candidates, who are mostly nonames however, or rather their party is a noname in this competition that means that they don’t get an even roughly important or slightly significant amount of the votes compared with the other two. Thus back to the Elephants (Republicans) and Donkeys (Democrats). Within these parties there are usually again several contestants who compete against each other. Normally they compete in the so-called primaries or caucuses, which are also worth being explained but due to your concentration I will focus only on the presidential election.

Anyway, the winner of this preliminary decision is then usually chosen as the presidential nominee at the party´s convention. In 2012, it was Mitt Romney for the Republicans, whereas the Democrats haven’t had any other combatants within the party back then than Obama, so they have nominated him the presidential nominee without any primary elections as they saw in him a front-runner. On top of that he was the incumbent that means that he already held the position and was therefore estimated a better-than-average chance of being re-elected.

Now as we have the opponents, let’s move on to the election itself. First of all, the presidential elections aren´t direct elections like those of the US-Senate but indirect elections that means that the president is in fact not elected directly by the people but by an Electoral College. 

Donkeys (Democrats) vs. Elephants (Republicans)

 So far so good, but how does the Electoral College work? 

Well, every state has a number of electors equal to the total of its US senators (which is always two) and its representatives, which are determined by the seize of the state´s population . California, the most populous state for example has 55 electoral votes (two senators and 53 representatives) while Rhode Island has only four. The District of Columbia by the way has three. All in all there are 538 electors in the college, and those are the ones, the Americans technically vote for, in order that they vote then the president in turn. The electors themselves are chosen by the parties and of course pledged to a certain candidate. Well, let’s say, actually they should be, as in some states they aren’t bound to vote for the candidate they´ve been elected for. So for example if an elector chosen by the Republican party and the Republican voters decided to vote for Obama, that would have been called a “faithless” elector, but this has happened only rarely throughout history. So basically the electors cast a vote for the candidate they are pledged to. 

Click on it to scale it up!

Now, in all states except for Maine and Nebraska the college works on a winner-takes-it-all (don’t mix it up with the song of ABBA) basis that means the winner of the popular vote in one state gets all the Electoral College Votes even if the margin of victory was only 49 to 51%. To become a president, the candidate needs at least 270 College Votes and doesn’t have to win the national popular vote which is one of the main criticisms and drawback of this system, because in 2000 for example Al Gore won the national popular vote but George W. Bush had more electoral votes and therefore became president. 


 

Why do they use this system rather than the popular vote? 

The system itself was chosen because it gives greater weight to the smaller states, one of the checks and balances the US constitution values. For example the largest state, California, has 12.03% of the US population but its 55 electors represent only 10.22% of the College total, while Wyoming, a sparsely populated state, has only 0.18% of the population, but its three seats in the Electoral College give it 0.56% of the college votes.

If no candidate gets a majority of Electoral College votes, then the House of Representatives elects the president and the senate elects the vice-president. The elections for the Electoral College are always on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, then the chosen electors meet in the capitals of their states and cast their vote, then the results are formally declared to the senate on 6^th January and the new president is finally inaugurated on 20^th January.

Here’s in the end a British video for you if you are interested in a short summary of this post!