Press. voanoticias.com
The next
chapter in the tumultuous U.S. presidential election plays out Monday, with
voting in the Electoral College expected to officially confirm that billionaire
real estate mogul Donald Trump will become the country's 45th president. Americans
have known since early November that Trump would take over the White House when
he is inaugurated January 20. U.S. presidential elections, however, are not
determined by the national popular vote, but rather by the individual outcomes
in presidential balloting in all 50 states and the national capital city,
Washington.
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The
popular vote winner in each state normally receives all of that state's
Electoral College votes, which are allotted in proportion to the state's
population. A total of 538 electors will cast those ballots Monday in their
respective state capitals.
The
Democratic candidate, former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton, defeated
Trump by nearly 2.9 million votes in the national popular vote. But the
Republican Trump won where it mattered, in enough of the state-by-state
contests to claim an apparent 306-232 edge in the Electoral College, well more
than the 270 majority he needs.
Clinton
piled up big vote margins in California and New York to give her a national
popular vote edge, while Trump won enough states, sometimes relatively
narrowly, to claim the Electoral College advantage and a four-year term as the
nation's leader. It would be the fifth time in U.S. history, and the second in
the last 16 years, that the popular vote winner did not win the all-important
Electoral College vote. In most election years, voting in the Electoral College
is little more than a formality. But that is not the case this year.
Because
of the close and bitterly contested race, and continuing opposition to Trump's
victory by many Clinton supporters, thousands of Americans have bombarded the
306 Republican electors with emails and phone calls, demanding they reject
Trump, either by voting for Clinton or another, more acceptable Republican. In
the unlikely event that 37 Republican electors defect from Trump and the vote
ends in a tie at 269, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives would
pick the president.
Most of
the electors, however, are bound by state law to vote for the candidate who won
their state vote count, or if they are not, say they feel morally compelled to
vote in the Electoral College the way their state voted.
Faithless
electors - those who cast Electoral College votes for someone other than the
presidential candidate who won their state - are not unheard of in American
political annals, but they are rare, with just a handful since the Electoral
College was first used in 1789.
Several
U.S. news media outlets who have interviewed at least some of the 2016 electors
say the vast majority are planning to back the winner in their state, with only
one known Republican elector, Chris Suprun in the southwestern state of Texas,
saying he would not vote for Trump.
Suprun,
however, told VOA that the number of faithless electors is "more than just
me. I'm thinking we're working toward the (37) we need to throw this to the
House of Representatives."
He
declined to say whom he would vote for on Monday. He said Trump has
"proved himself to be a demagogue," continuing his attacks on people
who criticize him since the election, much the same as he did during the
lengthy presidential campaign.
Some
analysts have predicted there might be more defectors, but until the electors
cast their Electoral College ballots, no one knows for sure.
The
country's Founding Fathers debated how to pick the country's presidents,
deciding against using the popular vote for fear that mob rule might ensue or
that the biggest states would have too much control of the ultimate outcome. It
settled on the Electoral College, in part to give even the smallest states at
least three electoral votes.
As it
currently stands, seven states and the U.S. capital, Washington, D.C., each
have three electoral votes. The Pacific coast state of California has the most,
at 55.
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