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Politics : WHO IS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT IN 2004 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Glenn Petersen who wrote (4889)	9/18/2003 7:48:01 PM
From: Tadsamillionaire	Respond to of 10965

Electoral College (last updated August 12, 2002) (back to top) The electoral college - the two-part system by which the United States determines its president - was a controversial subject in the aftermath of the 2000 election, but debate over how the president should be elected goes back to the very foundation of the United States. Under the electoral college, presidential elections involve two phases. First, people vote for a presidential candidate, but their votes actually elect a slate of electors who are in most states obligated to vote for that specific candidate. Second, in a move that was originally supposed to be substantive but has now become largely formalistic, those electors vote and officially elect the next President of the United States by majority vote. There are 538 electoral votes in total, and states are allotted such votes based on the number of seats they have in the House and Senate, a decision by the Framers of the Constitution that honored some of the compromises they made elsewhere such as counting 3/5 of a state's slaves as population, and giving each state two senators, regardless of the state's actual size. Accordingly, each state now has at least three electoral votes (two for each senator, and one minimum for the House) and the allotment of votes changes after each census. The following chart shows the distribution of votes following the 1990 and 2000 censuses, and helps explain why California, Texas and New York are such great prizes. newsaic.com