You're gonna be bothered by how cool I am.

A Guide to the American Voting Process, By a Highly Ignorant Livejournalist


An oft seen image from the 2000 election aftermath, this kind of sums up
how I sometimes feel when thinking about our voting process. ;-)

This is a post in response to a comment asking me to explain our voting system in America. After saying to myself, “GAH! There goes my afternoon!” I realized that this is probably something a lot of non-Yanks are curious about (and probably most Yanks as well - I know I'm interested, and am still learning).

I want to preface this post by stating EMPHATICALLY that I am no expert on these matters. I took the required number of civics classes in high school and college, and none of those classes really got into the voting process. There really are not many people on earth who can give definitive answers on this – even the pundits on the news who are trying to explain it to US get it wrong occasionally. What I have here I have gathered from my own voting experience, particularly this year, and where I have had questions myself, I have sought answers on the internet.

But here is my own personal understanding of how the voting thing works in the United States. If you know I've gotten something terribly wrong, feel free to respectfully correct me in the comments, and I'll edit the post accordingly when I can.



Not my actual card, but this is what my voter registration card looks like.

What to Know Before We Even Vote At All
The Constitution says that US citizens have the right to vote at the age of 18. You have to be a registered voter to cast a vote in an election, which means you have to fill out forms with the county in which you live. Once you are registered, you will be told your designated voting location. This is the only place where you can cast a vote in person. When I first registered to vote in 1996, I registered in Murfreesboro, where I was going to school at the time. Having forgotten to re-register when I moved away, I ended up having to go back to Murfreesboro (a 45 minute drive) so that I could vote for Al Gore in 2000. Luckily I have a freakish memory for certain things, and I was able to remember the very school building I'd gone to four years previously. :D Unluckily, my guy did not win the election. :P

Not everyone who is a citizen and at or above the age of 18 is allowed to vote, and this is a matter of no small controversy. Convicted criminals are not allowed to vote, for example, and some states forbid them to vote even after they are out of prison, if the crime was very serious. If you are not living in the country or the state where you're registered at the time of the election (military, for example, or university students), or if some circumstance is going to keep you from voting on Election Day (work, for example, although many employers will give you a couple of hours off to vote), you can vote by absentee ballot. These ballots are not all counted until a couple of weeks after Election Day, and of course this was an interesting factor in the 2000 election.

Different states - and even different cities within those states - have different methods for casting ballots. Some use paper ballots, some punch cards, some machines, some computers. [See rhrsoulmates' comment below for the old-school machines used where she casts her vote.] A lot of states have computerized voting booths, with touch screens, like below:



Some places are still in the 19th century with the paper ballots. Many argue that this is a better method, less subject to tampering or machine error, but it can lead to overdependence on the words "hanging" and "chad." Amazingly, there is somewhere in the country that was STILL using the kind of ballot shown below in the 2004 election. However, the advantage this method has over the computerized method, as peachespig pointed out in the comments, is that it leaves a paper trail that you can check if there is any question of tampering.



Just in case you were on another planet in 2000, a ballot like the one shown above will NOT BE COUNTED by the machine unless the hole is completely punched through and the chad completely gone from the ballot. This led to a lot of ballots not being counted in 2000 and a lot of faces of ballot counters looking a lot like the picture at the top of this post.

When We Vote and What For
The first Tuesday of each November is Election Day, and this is when we vote on elected officials. (Voting on issues sometimes happens on ED, but I don't think it's a rule. I'm guessing people are *most* interested in the Presidential elections, though, so I'll focus on that. We vote on who's going to be President every four years on Election Day. We also vote on who's going to be in the Congress - Senate every six years (with 1/3 of the seats up for re-election every 2 years), House of Representatives every two. No one can be President for more than ten years, and no one can be elected President more than twice (you could conceivably succeed a President who died before his/her term was up, and then be elected twice - thanks, carissa_lynn!). There has only been one President in history to serve more than that (Franklin D. Roosevelt, if you didn't know already and are interested - the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, establishing the two-term limit, was passed after his death, which occurred during his fourth term).

The Many Become the Few
We have two major parties, as I'm sure you know - Democrat and Republican. Democrats are most comparable in UK terms to England's Labor Party, and Republicans are most comparable to the Conservative Party. People decide to run for each party, and at about a year till election time, we'll usually have around 10 candidates for each party. As people run out of money or discover that they don't have quite as much public support as they need, they start to drop out. In January of the year of election, the primary process begins. Get some aspirin for this next part. :P

We Don’t Vote For the Candidate
By the time we get to THE election (called the General Election) in November, each party only has one candidate each, and that candidate is chosen by the PRIMARIES (which are basically pre-election elections) and CAUCUSES (which are different in format but serve the same purpose). Primaries and Caucuses are ... hmmm ... what we do there is vote for our preferred candidates, but what we're technically doing is voting for how many delegates our state is going to send to vote for that candidate at each party's national convention at the end of the summer. The *delegates* are technically the ones who select the candidates, but they are pledged to do what we told them to do when we voted in the primaries and caucuses. (Except for the superdelegates, and … just … later.:P) Each party has different rules, and each state in turn has its own rules for how it selects the delegates. In my state, for example, we have an “open” primary, which means I can vote for whoever I want, regardless of what party I’m registered with and which party the candidate is running for. Other states have “closed” primaries, which means that you can only vote in the party’s primary if you are registered with that party. All Democratic primaries have a proportional system for how many delegates a candidate gets for a particular state. For example, in New Hampshire, Clinton got 39% of the votes, so she gets roughly that percentage of New Hampshires’s 22 Democratic delegates (each state has a different number of delegates for each party, determined by their population). Many Republican primaries work the same way, but some of them are “winner takes all,” which means that whoever gets the most votes in that state gets ALL of the delegates.

FIRST!
Each party has a slightly different calendar for which states vote at which time, but there’s a definite pecking order, starting with Iowa and then New Hampshire. I have no idea how this began, but the national committees for the Democratic and Republican parties have made it a rule that only a handful of states (and they’re the same ones every election, I think, but slightly different for each party) can hold primaries or caucuses before February 5. A couple of states decided to break that rule this year, and as a result the Democratic National Committee has said that those states' delegates will not get to vote for the Democratic candidate at the convention (or, as it is typically put, they will "not get a seat"). Hillary Clinton is trying to undo that – big surprise, considering that she won both those states – but most of the pundits think that even if the delegates get to vote, there will be some catch (like, they’ll have to vote in proportion to the national delegate percentage for each candidate instead of the state results).

Why This Year is So Befuddling
Usually, by this time of the year, the candidate for each party has been basically determined, and each candidate can start concentrating on other things, like who their running mate (the Vice Presidential candidate) will be and general election campaign strategies and so forth. But, as you probably know, both parties are still duking it out over who’s going to be the nominee. Here’s where I start to get fuzzy(er) on the details, and this is why I’m watching a lot of MSNBC lately. Most of the time – in fact, throughout my lifetime – the national conventions have been little more than ceremonies. Everyone has known for a while who’ll be the nominee, and it’s a time for speech-making and yahoo-ing and balloon-dropping. But the convention CAN be a time where the real decision is made, by way of all kinds of secret deals, job promises, etc. But many people seem to think this would be bad for both parties, and I’m inclined to agree. A “brokered convention,” after all, is how the Repubs ended up nominating Richard Nixon in 1968.

A Democratic candidate needs 2025 delegates (a simple majority) to obtain the nomination of that party. A Republican candidate needs 1245 delegates (also a simple majority) to obtain the Rep. nomination. Why do the Democrats have so many more delegates to be fought over? They just do. The parties are run by different conventions and they're going to just do things differently.

Superdelegates
*sigh* I’m not sure I know how this works any better than anyone else. First of all, the Democrats are the only party that has superdelegates. These people, as I understand, are generally leaders of the party or former party office-holders, including all former Dem. Presidents and Vice Presidents. They are not associated with a particular state, and are not bound to the primary or caucus results of any state. They basically vote for who they want to, and this is a controversy, because these superdelegates have an enormous say in who gets to be the nominee. Much, MUCH more than the average voting citizen. To give you an idea how much a superdelegate vote counts for at the convention, 1 of their votes is equal to about 10,000 regular primary votes by Joe Schmoe voters. Which is crazy, in my opinion, but whatever.

The Electoral College, or We Don’t Vote For the Candidate, Part 2
Time to wash that aspirin down with some whiskey. ;)


Electoral map, with number of electors per state.

Again, just like in the primaries, when we vote we are not technically voting for the candidate, but for a group of people who essentially vote for who we tell them to vote for. But instead of delegates, we call these people ELECTORS.

The electoral system is different from the delegate system, though, because where the delegates (in most states) are pledged in proportion to the percentage of votes cast for a particular candidate, ALL of the electors of a particular state are pledged to vote for the SAME candidate – whoever got the most votes statewide. In fact, rather than voting for the candidate of our choice, we are actually voting on a slate of electors. My home state of Tennessee has 11 electoral votes, so when I vote, I am actually choosing between two slates of 11 electors each - 11 for the Dem. nominee, or 11 for the Rep. nominee. There are two exceptions to this – Maine and Nebraska’s electors do it differently, which sounds like a dirty bumper sticker, but I digress. The electors meet at their respective state capitols about a month after the general public casts their votes.

There are 538 electoral votes to be had in a Presidential election – one for each member of Congress, plus 3 for the Washington D.C. area (which does not belong to any state). A candidate must receive a simple majority of electoral votes (270) in order to win the election. In the event that neither candidate gets the majority (in our current two-party system, this means a 269-269 tie), there is a vote taken by the House of Representatives – each state gets one vote each, and the Representatives from that state decide who they will jointly vote for. That may sound not quite fair, and I won't wholly disagree, but it's meant to keep the hugely populous states like California, Texas, and New York from basically deciding the election by themselves.

Rogue Electors (*cue “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” theme*)
You may be wondering (or not, because you may be bored into a stupor at this point) … what would happen if an elector *didn’t* vote for the candidate he/she was supposed to? Well, the answer is … not much. There have been “faithless electors” in the past – 158, if you trust Wikipedia – and half of those voted against their pledged candidate because the original candidate died before the vote was taken. Two of them were non-votes, where the elector chose to abstain from voting. And the other (roughly) half were electors who voted for another candidate as a matter of personal choice or (occasionally) by accident – I wonder if the electors have the “chad” system. This is a fairly rare occurrence, as electors are generally chosen partly based on party loyalty, but each state has its own rules for how to deal with this, and since faithless electors generally act alone, they have never affected the either/or outcome of a Presidential election.


So, that's the best I can do. If you're curious and I haven't explained something well enough, feel free to ask, and I'll do my best to answer. I'll say again, though, that I am no expert and can only give my own interpretation of how it works, aided heavily by Google. :D

ETA (though not nearly the first): Here is a list of FAQs that MSNBC has put together about the election process.