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With the U.S. Presidential election fateful day fast approaching, candidates may not admit it but I’m sure both are jittery and anxious until this race will be over.

And not until all the votes are counted, tabulated and tallied, shall the winner be proclaimed. But what I thought was a simple process of vote counting and tallying is not as simple at all. Because the U.S. presidential election is not really won by the total number of votes of the population, but by the total number of states that voted for a particular candidate.

Hmm… did I confuse you even more? Let’s make it simpler. Let’s say in California, once the total number votes for that state has been tallied, the candidate with the most number of votes will be declared as the candidate which is voted upon or supported by California.

Same procedure applies to the other states – New York, Mississippi, etc. until all the states have their own voted candidate, which are all then tallied to get the candidate with the most number of state votes.

But still, there’s quite a problem in this scenario. Because not all of these different states have the same number of voting population, so it would be unfair for a state with more than five million population to have the same weight with that of a state that only has more than a million population.

A good example would be California with more than 36 million populations, as compared to Kansas with only over 3 million populations. So it’s important that California should have a bigger impact because it has a bigger population. The question then would be how we put weights on the states so their influence on the election would be in relation to their population.

This is determined then by getting the number of districts in every state, the bigger the population, the more districts a state has. And the more districts the state has, the bigger is its influence on the election.

A state’s influence on the election is called the ‘electors’ which is the number of district in a state plus the number of senator from that state, which is always 2. Examples are; North Carolina has 15 electors (13 districts + 2 senators) and California has 55 (53 + 2).

So when a candidate wins in a state, he wins the corresponding number of electors. This is how the candidate’s number votes really add up. By winning the in a big population state, he gets a bigger number of electors, which quantifies as his votes.

Adding up all the total number of electors from the different states of the U.S. will give you a total of 538 electors. The race then would be to get the majority of these electors or a total of 270. So by winning in more states (especially in big-population ones), a candidate who gets 270 electors first wins the election.

Here is a video that explains it: