Hi everybody, it's Bill Nigut again, here at Georgia Public Broadcasting with our
ongoing series of reports about Campaign 2016.
We'll be coming to you throughout this election year, giving you information that we hope helps you
understand the process just a little bit better, and leading up to that
all-important general election in November of this year. So let's get going.
let's talk today about the general election itself the election of a
president is really a two-step process the first step is the one that we're all
very familiar with on election day registered voters go to their polling
place and they cast ballots for their choice for President of the United
States that's called the popular vote but the popular vote isn't the end of
the process the next step is when the electoral vote comes into play electoral
votes are voted by members of the electoral college and it's these
individuals are the ones whose actual votes elect the President of the United
States so how do we determine the number of electoral votes that each state gets
the number of electors is basically determined by the number of congressmen
and Senators in each state that's 538 total electors from around the United
States so what that means is that to actually be elected president a
candidate has to win 270 of those electoral votes here in Georgia we have
16 electoral votes that makes us important in the process it's one of the
bigger states out there so here's what happens you go to the polls or your
parents go to the polls on Election Day and you they choose their candidate at
the end of the election day we see which candidate has won Georgia the electors
from Georgia are obligated when they meet as part of the electoral college to
cast their votes for the people that have been picked by the popular vote in
Georgia and those votes in the electoral college go to help a candidate win the
necessary 270 votes so the electoral college becomes more important than you
might think it's not just some arcane process that's been going on in this
country since our first presidential elections it's still important in the
strategic thinking about each campaign so let's talk about
as we've already said that Georgia has 16 electoral votes but the bigger states
include California with 55 New York with 29 Texas with 38 so because they have
such large pools of electoral votes campaigns want to make sure they can win
in those states to help build the total toward 270 they're going to need now
California is typically a democratic state New York is often democratic and
Texas is almost always Republican too so in a general election campaign a
candidate may decide not to focus too much attention on those states because
they're reliably either democratic or republican despite the large number of
electoral votes that those states will deliver so instead
campaigns focus on what we call swing states a great example is the state of
Pennsylvania Pennsylvania can go either Democrat or Republican and so it's
usually a very very highly competitive state for general election candidates
between Republicans and Democrats there are a lot of people out there who think
the electoral college should be eliminated and a president should be
elected by popular vote but right now it's the best system we've got see you
again next time
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