America chooses its next president: An Election Day guide for the world

America’s Election Day is here, and people all over the world are anxiously waiting to see whether U.S. voters choose Republican candidate Donald Trump or Democratic candidate Kamala Harris to be their next president. The impact of their choice will reverberate around the globe.

Adult U.S. citizens each get one vote to elect a president. But the race is not determined by winning the overall number of votes.

That’s because of the electoral college. States are allocated a certain number of “electors,” depending on their population size, who are expected to cast votes for the candidate that wins the popular vote in their state. For almost all states, if a candidate wins by even just a hair, they secure all the state’s electors. (There are just two exceptions, where the electors can be split.)

Now, here are the magic numbers that will be blasted over American cable news as votes are counted: There are 538 electoral votes available across all states.

To win the presidency, the candidates need to win at least 270 of them — a majority.

Going into the race, Democrats and Republicans are counting on holding states that are reliably blue (liberal) or red (conservative) and secure their electoral votes. California, for instance, gets 54, as the most populous state in the union, and typically goes to Democrats. Texas, which has voted Republican for almost five decades, has 40. So the attention is on a handful of “swing states” — which tend to flip between Democrats and Republicans.

Even razor-thin margins in these states can make a huge difference to who wins. That’s partly why the electoral college,envisioned in the 18th century by the framers of the U.S. Constitution as a sort of compromise between the population directly electing the president and Congress appointing someone, is controversial in America.

In 2000 and 2016, then-Republican candidates George W. Bush and Donald Trump respectively won the electoral college but not the popular vote. A recent Pew poll found more than 6 in 10 Americans would prefer to see the winner of the presidential election be the person who won the most votes nationally.

No other democracy uses an electoral college system to elect the leader of its government. Canada, Britain and Australia use parliamentary systems in which the country is led by a prime minister — a lawmaker who can command a majority in the legislature. A handful of other countries, such as Germany and India, use systems comparable to the electoral college to elect their head of state, or president, but not to select the country’s actual executive, the prime minister.

The United States would need to amend its Constitution to reform or abolish the electoral college system. There have been hundreds of attempts to do that. All have failed.

Which are the swing states in 2024?

Just 18 percent of American voters live in swing states, also called battleground states, as America grows increasingly polarized along both political and geographic lines.

In this election,voters in the seven states of Pennsylvania (which has 19 electoral votes), Georgia (16), North Carolina (16), Michigan (15), Arizona (11), Wisconsin (10) and Nevada (6) are the ones to watch. The Post’s pre-election day polling averages showed neither candidate leading by more than two points in any of them.

Different combinations of those states could help each candidate secure a path to victory — or what’s sometimes called “the road to 270.” Harris campaign officials see winning Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, plus one electoral vote in Nebraska, as their best chance if they can keep Democratic strongholds. Trump campaign officials see a path through North Carolina, Georgia and Pennsylvania.

Voters living in swing states receive a barrage of messages from campaigns on their phones, in their mail, from their friends, family and colleagues, over radio, television, streaming services and social media networks.

Editor;msserwanga@gmail.com