The US presidential election process explained

I hope to explain how a US president is chosen without becoming hopelessly bogged down in minutiae (or, if you prefer, becoming bogged down in hopeless minutiae). So fasten your seat belts, take a deep breath, and try to stick with me all the way to the end, at which time you will have either ascended to a higher level of enlightenment or descended to a lower circle of hell (a shout-out here to Dante Alighieri and his Inferno).

Here we go.

Until 1960, only US citizens who resided in one of the many states (currently there are 50) could vote in presidential elections. Since 1960, US citizens who reside in the District of Columbia (the nation's capital, Washington, DC) can also vote in presidential elections because of an amendment to the US Constitution. US citizens who reside in the US-owned territories of Puerto Rico, Guam, the Solomon Islands, and the Virgin Islands cannot vote in presidential elections. Non-citizens of the US are not permitted to vote in a presidential election no matter where they live, although some communities do allow non-citizens to vote in local elections. (The fact that in many states a person obtaining a driver's license is automatically registered to vote is a cause for much concern, nay, alarm to those who don't like that the current administration has allowed illegal border crossings into this country to surge.)

If you think the US president is determined by which candidate gets the most votes in a national election, you would be wrong. We do not have a national election for president, which makes so-called 'national polls' meaningless. No, friends, we have 51 elections held on the same day, one in every state plus the one in the District of Columbia. The US presidential election is decided by an 'electoral college' consisting of 538 electors. The candidate who wins a majority (that is, 270) electoral votes wins the presidential election. More on this in a minute. If no candidate receives 270 electoral votes, the US House of Representatives, where each state gets only one vote for this special circumstance, decides who will become president. (This actually occurred in 1800, 1824, and 1876. Another special circumstance occurred in 2000, when the US Supreme Court effectively decided who would be president by stopping Florida's prolonged recounting of votes because of disputed ballots with infamous 'hanging chads'.)

Why 538 electors? It's a little complicated and I'll try to make it as simple as I possibly can. There are 435 voting members of the nation's House of Representatives. The size of the US House grew as the nation grew until the number of seats was frozen in 1929. After each national census, which occurs every ten years, the number of people represented by each House seat changes, and the legislature in each state draw up a new congressional district map to accommodate the changes. This process is called reapportionment. Since the last census in 2020, some states gained seats (for example, Texas gained 2, Florida gained 1) and some states lost seats (for example, California, New York, and Pennsylvania each lost a seat). In the US Senate, the other house of our bicameral (that is, two-house) legislature, each state gets two senators regardless of its physical size or population, and because the US has 50 states, the Senate has 100 members (note that if the District of Columbia and/or the territory of Puerto Rico becomes a state the number of seats in the US Senate will increase).

If you add 435 and 100, you get 535, which is close to 538 (the number of electors in the Electoral College). The remaining three electors are allotted to the District of Columbia, which is not a state but whose residents can vote in presidential elections as I mentioned earlier, one for its population and two for senators. Each state's allotment, then, is based on its population; that is, the number of congressional districts it has (for example, California has 52, New York has 26, Wyoming has 1, and Georgia where I live has 14) plus each state gets 2 more electoral votes for having two senators.

Each political party with a candidate on the ballot puts together a slate of electors in each state (plus DC) who are pledged to vote for that party's candidate when the Electoral College meets on the same day in each state capitol. Sometimes an elector will break his or her pledge and become a 'faithless elector' who votes for someone else.

The 435 House seats are allotted to the 50 states according to their population. Each state is divided into congressional districts based on population and a representative from each district is elected to serve for two years in the nation's House of Representatives in Washington. The size of the H of R grew over the years as the nation grew and more states were added to the union. According to the most recent official census, the population of the 50 states and the District of Columbia was 331,449,281 in 2020. Because the size of the House of Representatives has been frozen at 435 since 1929 and the census of 2020 counted about 332,000,000 each congressional district during this decade should contain around 750,000 people but some districts are smaller and some are larger. As Joe E. Brown said to Jack Lemmon at the end of Some Like It Hot, nobody's perfect.

This year, Georgia is one of seven states referred to as 'battleground states' or 'swing states' in the presidential election (the others are Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin). The remaining 43 states are considered fairly predictable as to which party they will choose based on their past selections. That is, some states are more liberal, some are more conservative, and some are toss-ups. Accordingly, Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump are both concentrating their presence and their campaign money contributions in the seven states I mentioned. Lucky us (I'm being sarcastic).

A month after the election, the slates of electors meet in the 50 state capitals plus the District of Columbia and officially cast their ballots. which are certified and transported to Washington. Sometimes, as I mentioned, there are 'faithless electors' who go rogue and cast their ballots for someone other than the candidate to whom they were pledged. In Washington, each state's certified results are opened and announced in a joint session of Congress led by the sitting Vice-President. Last time around it occurred on January 6, 2021. Maybe that date rings a bell. We won't pursue it further at this time.

Already in this campaign season, with seven weeks left until Election Day, there have been two assassination attempts on one of the major party candidates. There is trouble right here in River City, and that starts with T and that rhymes with P and that doesn't stand for pool.

There now, wasn't that simple? (I'm being sarcastic again.) Seriously, I hope this post has helped you to understand how a US president is chosen. If not, I suppose it would only muddy the waters further by telling you that there actually are not 51 elections but 3,242 county or county-equivalent (Louisiana has parishes, Alaska has boroughs) elections including, of course, the District of Columbia.

The 650 members of the House of Commons in the UK represent 68,000,000 people, give or take, while the 435 members of the US House of Representatives represent 335,000,000 million people currently, give or take. We are neither a monarchy nor a paiamentary system, but which government sounds more democratic to you?