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Strictly speaking, none of the 328 Americans who voted last Tuesday elected the next president. the the country’s system makes these votes non-direct, but what they chose was the 538 members of the Electoral College.
In the USA the choices are indirect, that is, citizens do not vote for the president but for a group of people nominated by each party in the 50 states and in Washington DC to represent their will. In a month, these voters sWe will meet to vote for one of the presidential candidates. They are expected to support what the citizen has chosen, but there have been cases where this was not the case.
Each The state has a number of voters equal to the number of seats in the House of Representatives, which are proportional to population, plus its two seats in the Senate.. As California is the most populous in the country, it has 53 members of Congress and two Senators, making it 55 voters, for example. However, if you add up all the MPs and Senators, you get 535. The other three are from the capital, Washington DC, which since 1961 has had these voters even though it does not elect any MPs or Senators.
When a party wins in a state, it adds up all the members elected to represent them in the electoral college, the other parties have nothing left. The exceptions to this rule are Maine and Nebraska, which elect voters as if they were members of Congress, so there can be members from different parties in the college on behalf of the same state.
The system has its detractors. One of the problems is that there have already been cases where the voters of a party did not vote for the elected candidate. In fact, seven changed their vote in 2016. Another is that it is not always the one with the most votes in the election that wins, as happened to Al Gore in 2000 or Hillary. Clinton in 2016.
Confirmed which presidential candidate won in each state, the electoral college is formed. The peculiarity is that it does not function as a collegial body; its members never meet in the same place.
Voters will gather, According to the Constitution, the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December, this year on the 14th, in the capitals of their respective states. A certificate will be read that will report the results of the elections and the voters chosen. Then one of them will be appointed to chair the session.
This is where the vote begins: first for the president and then for the vice-president on separate ballots. Depending on the state, they will have to write the name or mark with a cross if the candidates are already written. The votes are then counted, a report is made and sent to Washington DC.
In January, after all states had sent the minutes sThe two chambers of Congress meet, made up of new members but chaired by the outgoing vice-president, and the 538 votes are counted.
Here can be given two negative scenarios: one is that there is equality, which is possible because the number is even; the other is that there is a winner but does not get the most 270. Congress must then make a decision. The The House of Representatives votes the president between the two most voted, but not individually, but by state. That is, representatives from Maine, for example, get together and vote to say who the state they represent supports. An antecedent of this happened in 1800 when Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr tied for the Electoral College and lawmakers chose the former. The Senate elects the vice-president, but in this case, all senators vote.
According to Seth C. McKee, professor of political science and coordinator of the US government at Oklahoma State University, there is no doubt that the founding fathers created the Electoral College because they did not trust the judgment of the people. In fact, in the early decades, state legislators elected their state’s voters, who in turn voted for the president. The main consequence of this decision is that in five elections the winner of the popular vote did not win the presidency.. This is a serious problem, which clearly undermines the will of the people by allowing the candidate with the fewest votes to end up for the presidency. Therefore, the electoral college, at least sometimes, seems illegitimate as a democratic institution, because the overwhelming majority of Americans believe that the winner of the popular vote should be president. ”
The fact that the most voted candidate is not the president has several precedents. We could go back to 1824 or 1876, but it also happened in the last election before Tuesday, when George W. Bush and Donald trump they won in the electoral college but not by majority vote.
For some analysts, the indirect voting system loses its validity, because it makes small states have a lot of influence in the determination of the president to the detriment of those who live in large states.
However, changing the system is very difficult. Both Republicans and Democrats, when in power, have shown no intention of changing it, especially the former, who are historically the ones who have benefited the most. In addition, amending the Constitution is almost impossible because it takes two-thirds of both houses of Congress to do so and this modification must be ratified by a majority of states.
In our country, the indirect suffrage system was used for all presidential and senatorial elections until the constitutional amendment of 1994 when it switched to direct voting.
Source: Infobae
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