Once every four years, we hear about the “electors”: in the US electoral system it is they, and not the citizens, who ultimately elect the president of the United States. Each of the 50 states, plus the District of Columbia in the capital Washington, offers a certain number of electors up for grabs. To understand the mechanism, we can consider them as points: each state assigns a certain number of points, proportional to its population (and not to its size).
In all, the electors, and therefore the points, are 538. The person who manages to obtain at least half plus one, i.e. 270, becomes president.
A state’s points – for example, Texas’ 40 – all go to the candidate who comes first in that specific state. There is no proportional distribution: whoever gets even just one vote more than the others wins them all (except in two states, Maine and Nebraska, as we explained here).
The electors are activists, volunteers or local politicians: the candidates indicate them for each state by compiling a list of trusted people. The task of the electors, if elected, is very short: they will have to meet only once (the Tuesday following the second Wednesday of December, this year on December 17) in their states to formally cast a vote for the candidate they want to elect president. The body that brings together all the electors is called the “electoral college” (electoral college in English) but in reality it never physically meets.
Voters are legally free to vote for whoever they want, regardless of the candidate they were connected to, but their political commitment has been violated few times in history, and never in a way that determines the final outcome of an election. Many states have also introduced specific laws to punish the so-called faithless electorsi.e. electors who do not vote as expected: they can be fined and replaced with another elector loyal to the party that won in that state, so as not to risk distorting the result and the will of the citizens.
Swiss
