AL JAZEERA
Understanding the Electoral College, battleground states and key races in the US for the November 5 vote.
In 48 states, the presidential candidate who gets the most votes wins all that state’s electors, but in Maine and Nebraska, the winner-takes-all method does not apply.
These two states allocate their electors based on a more complicated system that reflects the popular vote on the state and congressional district levels. Hence, their Electoral College votes can be split.
The number of electors in each state is equal to the number of its House members plus two, the number of US senators from each state.
For example, California gets 54 Electoral College votes. That corresponds to its two senators and 52 House members.
There are a total of 538 electors: 535 from the 50 states and three from the District of Columbia, which is the federal capital and not a state.
Before the elections, the political parties in each state choose their slate of electors. The electors are almost always party officials or supporters.
Under this system, a candidate who wins the popular vote may not actually win the White House.
One recent example was in 2016 when Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College vote to Republican Donald Trump. His victory was buoyed by wins in key swing states that polls had predicted would go in favour of Clinton: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
There can also be “faithless electors” like in 2016 when seven electors cast their ballots for the other candidate rather than the one that won the state’s vote.
Five of the electors were unfaithful to Clinton and two to Trump. One of the Democratic electors voted for Senator Bernie Sanders instead of Clinton.
A Supreme Court decision in 2020 rejected the idea that electors may exercise discretion in the candidate they back. The court sided with Washington and Colorado courts that imposed penalties on faithless electors.
What are battleground states?
Most states lean very clearly towards either Democrats or Republicans, making their electoral outcomes almost a given.
But every four years, several states offer close races between the two main presidential candidates. These are known as battleground states, swing states or toss-up states. Candidates disproportionately focus their campaigns on these states.
Election analysts consider states battlegrounds when opinion polls show the margin of victory in those states to be fewer than 5 percentage points.
The seven battleground states expected to determine the outcome of the 2024 elections are:
- Arizona – 11 electoral votes
- Georgia – 16 electoral votes
- Michigan – 15 electoral votes
- Nevada – six electoral votes
- North Carolina – 16 electoral votes
- Pennsylvania – 19 electoral votes
- Wisconsin – 10 electoral votes
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