Constitutional Law Assignment

Topic - How the US President is elected

Summitted by –
Upasana Chopra

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 How the US President is elected
Presidential election in the United States is not regarded as the direct elections, it is a matter of
indirect elections. The entire election procedure repeats itself in every four years marking the
day of Tuesday after the first Monday in the month of November. In the US President election
process, the public do not in fact cast their vote directly to the President. The public in general
gave their vote to electors and further these electors select the next President from the
candidates standing in election process.

In order to be a President of US, a person should fulfill the certain basic requirements as
mentioned under the US Constitution, Article 2 Section 1. This states that the person who is
going to be the next President of US should be the natural born citizen of the US, in other words
he should possess the citizenship of US. Also, along with this a person standing in the elections
should have minimum age of 35 years, the person who is standing in the elections should be
permanently living in US from the last 14 years. In order to elected as a President of US, there
are the four main steps – Primaries and Caucuses, National Conventions, General Elections
and Electoral College.

The first step of the Presidential election process starts with Primaries and Causes where the
individual having the same political thought are part of the same political group. Republican
and Democrat are basically the two types of political parties in the US country. since, there are
many political parties and each party dreams of their winning, so in order to attract people so
that people cast their vote for that political party, these political parties group start their
campaign around the whole country and gave a tough competition to the other parties so that
they can win their party’s nomination. On the other hand, whereas in Caucuses, meeting among
the party members takes place. In this meeting, the entire members of that political party
discuss, decide and cast their vote that who would be considered as the best candidate. And
then in Primaries, all the party members gave their vote in the favor of that candidate in the
general elections whom they favor, and they wanted that person to be elected as the US next
President.

After Primaries and Caucuses, the next step is of National Conventions and General Elections.
In this step the two main political groups of US, Democrats and Republicans carries
Presidential Convention in order to select their nominee. After this, the Presidential nominee
select the Vice-President which he supposes to be perfect and that the Presidential nominee
travels around the whole of the country so as to win the faith of the general public so as to get
the maximum votes during the time of election. The next step come in front is of General
Elections. In this step, general public caste their vote for a person whom they wish to be elected
as a President for the country. It is the step where the decision making of the public comes into
the existence.

The next process is of Electoral College. There are around total population of 538 electors form
Electoral College. Here, when the people vote for their selected candidates, they in general
gave their vote for a group of that political party rather than an individual member from that
political party and this group for whom vote is casted is called as group of electors. Since, each
state gets a particular counting of electors based on their representation in the congress. The
counting of electors which each state possess is the sum total of the total number of Senators
and the Representative. The sum makes as follows- 2 Senators adding to the 8 Members of the

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House of the Representative, gives a sum total of 10 electors. From the total of 538 Electors,
each elector gave their one vote in the Presidential election procedure. And, hence the person
who gets in total 270 votes or more win the election procedure and is thus elected as the new
President of the country. Therefore, at the last the new elected President is being introduced to
the public and the office in January.

Hence, it can be concluded that for the selection of the President, it is not in the hands of general
public. They are the electors who cast their vote for selection of the President. It simply means
that the person standing in the election, who wins the popular vote gets all the votes of state
electoral as they themselves gave their vote to the participant who gets the popular vote. No
matter what number of votes a participant get in a particular state. What matters is that they
should get more votes in respect to the other candidates. Also, in the US Presidential election
process, the public is only supposed to provide a hint regarding their choice and rest of the
work is done by 538 electors. So, voters also play an important role but not in a direct way.
The participant getting the majority of the votes of the electors is elected as the next President
of US and is introduced to the public and to the office in January.