Around 150 million Americans will go to the polls today to vote in the US presidential elections, but they won’t be deciding the fate of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney just yet…
So what are people voting for today? I thought this was for the presidential election?
Well, it is and it isn’t. The American voting system is fairly complicated – to say the least. Firstly there’s the main presidential election, but then there’s also a massive vote going on in the House of Representatives and a third of the Senate seats are also up for grabs. So there’s a lot of voting to be done.
However, the American people aren’t actually doing the deciding themselves. They’re basically going to the polls today to vote for who they think their state representatives should vote for on their behalf.
Seriously? So who’s actually doing the voting?
The final deciding vote is cast by a group of representatives known as the Electoral College. This is just one of the many complicated steps to the American voting system. Here’s a little video by C.P.G. Grey that might help to explain it a bit better:
Right, well at least that’s cleared up… I think. So how do the candidates actually win?
Well, as you know now from the video, the candidates need 270 electoral votes to win the majority, and because some states are heavily one sided (New York and California are mostly Democratic while some southern states are largely Republican) both Obama and Romney need to win the ‘swing states’ or ‘battleground states’. There are eight swing states this year including: Florida (29 electoral votes), Ohio (18), New Hampshire (4), Iowa (6), Colorado (9), Nevada (6), North Carolina (15) and Virginia (13).
So who looks most likely to win?
Some political analysts believe that because most states are already heavily one sided Obama will start the race with around 247 Electoral votes in the bag, while Mitt will only have around 191. That means Obama would only need another 23 Electoral votes from the swing states to win. However, as the video above shows you, the Electoral vote of the state sometimes goes against the popular vote (what the citizens of that state voted for).
So wait… you can win, but technically lose at the same time?
Exactly. Let’s say everyone in the US voted for Obama in the polls, well that means each state’s Electoral College members would be told that the citizens want Obama as president. Said Electoral College members could say ‘screw that, we want Romney’ and they could vote him in. That would mean Obama won the popular vote but lost the Electoral vote.
So when do Americans actually hit the polls?
Polling started this morning at 11.00 GMT in New Hampshire and Virginia – two of the swing states. According to reports, we’ll know who won the popular vote pretty much as soon as the polling stations close tonight. So you might want to put on a pot of coffee.
