5三1us election system.pptVIP

U S ???E l e c t i o n ???S y s t e m What is the Electoral College? The actual mechanism of electing the president and the vice president of the United States is a rather complicated process. The electoral college is one of the many compromises written into the t United States Constitution in 1787. The founding fathers devised the electoral college to elect the president but they did not anticipate the emergence of national political parties or a communications network able to bring presidential candidates before the entire electorate. electoral college, in U.S. government, the body of electors that chooses the president and vice president. The Constitution, in Article 2, Section 1, provides: “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.” However, no senator, representative, or officer of the U.S. government may be an elector. The electors are directed by the Constitution to vote in their respective states, and Congress is authorized to count their votes. Voters in each state choose among slates of electors pledged to one candidate or another. These electors - collectively called the Electoral College - in turn cast their votes to pick the president. Each state receives the number of electoral votes equal to the number of its members of the House of Representatives, which depends on the states population, and the number of its senators, which is always two. So, for example, Florida has 25 electoral votes, because it has 23 members of the House and two senators. California has the most electoral votes, with 54. No state gets any fewer than three electoral votes. The District of Columbia also has three electoral votes. In 48 states, and in the District of Columbia, it is a winner-take-all system: The winner of the popular vote in a given state receives all of that states electoral votes. Lets