2020 has been an extremely eventful year and a lot has happened, so it’s hard to imagine another major event taking place in the forthcoming months. However, we are about to be thrown into the next whirlpool of news whether we like it or not, because The US Election has arrived. 

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As somebody who lives in the UK, American elections seem awfully confusing, but after a bit of research, I had a rough idea of how they work. In this article I hope to share my knowledge and help you, so that when this year's election comes around, you have a better idea of what is going on. 

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Let’s imagine that I wanted to become president, first I would have to be at least 35 years old, must have lived in the US for 14 or more years and must have been born in the US. In real life I definitely don’t fit these conditions, but let’s imagine that I do. To continue, I am going to need a lot of money, to fund my campaign. My next step is to get nominated by my political party as their presidential nominee, this process takes a lot of time and effort, going through a series of votes in individual states, these votes are called primaries and caucuses. Let’s say that I have been successful and have been nominated by my party to run for president. The next step is to win the presidential vote. 

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The presidential vote takes place on the Tuesday after the first Monday of November. This year it is on the 3rd of November. Each state has a number of electors, depending on the population of the state. So, California, which has a very large population has 55 electoral votes whereas Delaware a state with a small population has only 3 electoral votes. The Electoral College is made up of all of the electors in the country, there are 538 electors in the country and presidential candidates need at least 270 elector's votes to win.  

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Each state sets out rules on how its electors will vote in the Electoral College, but the vast majority require all electors from their state to vote for the presidential candidate who wins the majority of votes in that state. As an example of how this works lets imagine that there is a state of 100 people and it has 5 electors. 51 of the 100 votes for me, and the other 49 votes for my opponent. As I have won the popular vote, all 5 of that state’s electors will vote for me in the Electoral College, my opponent will get no votes from this state.

This process is repeated in all of the states, with the number of Electoral College votes varying depending on the size of the population in each state. A lot of presidential candidates only focus on campaigning in states with a large number of electoral votes as it gives them a huge boost in their ultimate goal, to get 270 of the Electoral College’s votes. Because of the way the system works, a situation can arise where Candidate A gets the majority of votes from the public, but Candidate B still wins, because they got the majority of Electoral College votes. Indeed, this happened in the most recent election, with Donald Trump winning with fewer votes from the public than Hilary Clinton.