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HOW ELECTORAL COLLEGE, NOT POPULAR VOTE, PICKS US PRESIDENT
Although the United States prides itself as the world’s pre-eminent democracy, where each person can have their say about who should be president, the Constitution calls for states to choose “electors” who do the actual electing.
This is known as the Electoral College.
Since the first presidential election in 1789, won by George Washington, there have been 59 U.S. elections.
In all but five – two in this century – the president had won both the popular votes and the Electoral College votes.
In 2000, Democratic candidate Al Gore garnered 543,895 more votes nationwide than Republican George W. Bush.
But in a contentious race that went all the way up to the Supreme Court, the judges decided to end a recount in Florida, giving the state’s then 25 electoral votes to Mr Bush.
This took Mr Bush past the magic number of 270 electoral votes and ensured him the presidency.
In 2016, when Donald Trump was elected, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by a much bigger margin, receiving 2.9 million more votes nationwide.
But Mr Trump became president because he garnered 304 electoral votes to Mrs Clinton’s 227.
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If the number of electoral votes is tied, then the election is decided by the newly elected House of Representatives.
How the electoral votes work
Each state is allotted electors equal to their number of representatives in Congress.
This means there are 538 electors in total: 435 representatives and 100 senators, plus three for the District of Columbia.
If a candidate wins 270 electors or more, therefore, he or she wins the presidency.
In 48 states, the candidate with the most votes, however slim the margin is, wins all the state’s electoral votes.
Maine and Nebraska do things differently and allocate electoral votes by individual congressional districts.
Some critics regard the Electoral College as an anachronism and prefer it be replaced with the national popular vote.
They say that the Electoral College makes a mockery of the “one person, one vote” system the country extols.
Furthermore, it causes candidates to concentrate their campaigns primarily on a handful of swing states where the vote could go either way, turning the majority of voters elsewhere in the country into bystanders.
But proponents say the reverse would happen if the president were elected by the popular vote.
Then candidates would concentrate their campaigning in the big states – California, Texas and New York – and voters in smaller states would be the onlookers.
But what really do the two major candidates in the US presidential election represent?
Kamala Harris is the first woman, first black person and first person of South Asian descent to be vice president of the United States.
After four years in the second-highest office, she now wants to make history again by holding the top job.
She received President Joe Biden’s blessing when he stepped back from being the Democratic candidate just three months ago, triggering her whirlwind campaign.
Ms Harris was born on 20 October 1964 in Oakland, California. She often touts her middle-class upbringing to voters. Her father, Donald, migrated from Jamaica to study economics while her mother, Shyamala, a cancer researcher and civil rights activist, came from India.
They married in 1963 and separated when Harris was 5 years old.
Mrs Harris, 60, has largely played down her gender and race. But she has said that India is an important part of her life.
When she and her younger sister Maya were children, their mother travelled with them to India almost every other year to see relatives there – and to instil in them a love of Indian food.
Shyamala died of colon cancer in 2009. Mrs Harris rarely speaks of her father, who went on to become a professor at Stanford University. She once told an interviewer that they were not close.
Mrs Harris became the first black district attorney of San Francisco in 2002 and later served for six years as California’s attorney-general.
When she moved to the US Senate in 2017, she used her experience as a prosecutor to make her mark at high-profile hearings by grilling witnesses, from Mr Trump’s officials to Supreme Court nominees.
Mrs Harris met her partner, Doug Emhoff, an entertainment lawyer, relatively late in life.
A friend set up a blind date for the two of them in California, where they were living at the time in 2013.
They married the following year.
