Wednesday, 05 November 2008 00:00 | and posted in Features
Obama stormed to victory in the US Presidential race leading 349 Electoral College votes to 162 over John McCain. But what on earth does this mean? In American elections the voters do not directly choose the President. Instead, what's known as an Electoral College is used. Each state has a set number of electors. This number is worked out by adding the number of Senators (which is always two) to the number of state representatives as demonstrated in the sum below:
No. of Electors = 2 Senators + No. of Representatives
The number of representatives is determined by the size of the state's population. Therefore, California, the most populous state, has 55 electoral votes (i.e. 2 Senators and 53 Representatives) as compared to a few small states like Wyoming and Vermont who have 3 electoral votes (i.e. 2 Senators and 1 Representative).
All together there are 538 electors in the College. In all but Maine and Nebraska, the College works on a winner-takes-all basis. The party with the greatest number of votes (called the "Popular Vote" gets all the Electoral College votes in that state.
To become President you need 270 electoral votes. This is why Obama's win is being called a landslide as he's gained at least 349 Electoral College votes so far.
The major drawback of this system is that the winning candidate may actually get fewer popular votes than the losing candidate. For example in 2000, Al Gore won 48.33% of votes nationwide compared to George W. Bush's 47.87%. Yet Bush won because he got 271 Electoral votes compared to Gore's 266.
This year there is no doubt that it is Barack Obama the American people want as their President. So far Obama has picked up 52.31% of the votes counted.
You may hear or read about another race in the news. This is the Congressional race. Congress has two houses: the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Senate is made up of 100 Senators (2 each from each of the 50 states), while the House of Representatives are made up of, yep, you've guessed it, all of the state Representatives.
If a party has a majority in either of these two houses they are said to "control" the house. If they have control over both the Senate (also called the "Upper House") and the House of Representatives (also called the "Lower House") they are in a very strong position to gain the votes they need in both houses to enact their policies.
Last night saw the Democratic Party increase their majority in both houses. In the Senate they have at least 56 seats, while in the House of Representatives Democrats had won 251 seats compared to the Republicans 171 with eleven races still undecided. This leaves Obama with a stronger hand in enacting his agenda of change.
If you want to know more check out the BBC's News Coverage of the US Election or you can download a PDF of the Electoral College results from the Independent's website.