How Do US Presidential Elections Work?, Op-ed

The US Senate has approved President Donald Trump's Conservative Judge Amy Connie Barrett's nominee as a member of the Supreme Court, thus consolidating the right's hegemony over the highest judicial body in the United States.

Trump, who is seeking to win a second presidential term in the elections scheduled for next week, praised Barrett’s appointment, describing this event in a ceremony held at the White House lawn and attended by a number of parliamentarians, as a "Momentous day for America."

After taking the constitutional oath before Supreme Court member Judge Clarence Thomas, the 48-year-old Catholic judge said, “I stand here tonight with pride and humility."

With the Senate's approval of Barrett's appointment, some believe that Trump could use this victory in his election rounds to garner sufficient support in swing states and narrow the gap with his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, who is currently leading the polls. But will this appointment really have an impact on the US presidential election?

The answer will become understandable if we bring to mind the complex nature of the US presidential elections, which we professors of international relations and comparative law feel excited when giving questions about them to our students in universities to examine them about the comparative electoral system in Western countries; only the USA follows a special and complex system that no one has been able to change despite the constant calls from Congress and even American legal professionals...

The first legal axiom in this complex electoral system is that it is based on indirect universal suffrage, which ultimately relies on the so-called "Electoral College", to determine the identity of the new president. Of course, this means that obtaining the majority of the votes does not mean winning the election.

On November 8, 2016, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton got about three million votes compared to her Republican rival Donald Trump, but this difference in the so-called "popular election” did not prevent the current US president from winning the presidency of the United States to succeed Barack Obama. The reason behind this, which constitutional law scholars know very well, is that what determines the race to the White House is the ‘Electoral College’.

The presidential election system by universal indirect suffrage in one round dates back to the Constitution of 1787, and was defined by what they called the "Founding Fathers" (including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson) as a compromise between the election of a president by direct universal suffrage and his election by Congress according to a system they considered at meantime undemocratic.

According to this system, a presidential candidate must obtain the absolute majority of the Electoral College votes, about 270 out of 538 votes, to win the White House seat. Despite the congress several attempts to make amendments or cancel the electoral college, the matter has not changed for 233 years.

The top voters are distributed among the fifty states that make up the USA, in addition to the federal capital, Washington D.C., according to the number of representatives of each of them in the House of Representatives (according to the state's population) and in the Senate (two for each state, regardless of size).

This electoral system still raises a lot of tension and controversy in the US between politicians and jurists, especially since Trump has threatened several times not to recognize the results of the election if his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, wins.

In total, five presidents arrived at the White House even though they lost the popular vote. The first was John Quincy Adams in 1824 and the last was George W. Bush in 2000.

Gore had won by 500,000 votes over Bush at the national level, but when Bush won the Florida votes, the total number of votes of the electoral college rose to 271, thus he won the presidency.

After Trump won 306 senior voters in the 2016 election, millions of Americans signed a petition calling on top Republican voters to block him. But all those endeavors were mostly unsuccessful, because only two members of Texas complied with this petition, leaving Trump with 304 votes.

This is the nature of the American electoral system, which heralds unprecedented surprises in the coming few days.