Name: US election 2020: What is the electoral college? - BBC News
Uploaded: 2020-12-15T20:26:31.000Z
Duration: 3 min
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S election is over and Joe Biden has secured the presidency with 80 million votes.

But there's still a significant step to go on December 14th, and it all comes down to how the U.

When Americans went to the polls, they weren't technically voting for Donald Trump or Joe Biden.

But for members of something called the Electoral College, the word college simply refers to a group of people or electors with a shared task to choose the president of the United States.

The system goes back more than 200 years.

The founders of the United States wanted to establish a democratic system, but we're concerned that a direct popular vote might lead to the election of an unsuitable president.

Electors were settled on as a compromise.

Each state was given a number of electors based roughly on the size of its population.

Today there are 538 electors, and the successful presidential candidate will need to get a majority of these at least 270 in order to win.

In most states, the candidate who wins the popular vote gets the support of all of that state's electors, for example, whether a winning candidate gets 99 or 51% of the vote in California, they would still receive all the states 55 electoral College votes.

That's why it's possible for a candidate to lose the popular vote across the country, but still secure a majority of Electoral College votes and become president.

That's what happened in 2016, when Trump secured the presidency despite getting almost three million fewer votes than his election rival.

Two out of the last six elections were won by candidates who had fewer votes than their rivals, although this hadn't happened for more than 100 years before the 2000 election.

What all this means is that campaigns often focus on strategies that help secure the 270 electoral votes needed to win.

They tend to target battleground or swing states rather than trying to turn out voters in states which consistently vote for the same party.

In fact, in the 2020 presidential election, 12 battleground states on 96% of campaign events.

33 states son no events at all, So the 538 members of the Electoral College play a crucial role in how the president of the United States is elected.

 Over the years, there have been efforts to change the electoral college system, but proponents say it helps deliver decisive results across a vast country, and everyone knows the rules of the game before Election Day. 