Question

Explain how the President of the United States is elected.

Answer 1

Eligibility Guidelines set by U.S. Constitution: Article II of the United States Constitution establishes the Executive Branch of the Government, including the President, Vice-President and other executive officers. Within Article II, rules are set as to who can become President and how a President is elected : 

Article II Section 1.
The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He or she shall hold his office during the term of four years and together with the Vice President, chosen for the same term, be elected, as follows :

No person except a natural-born citizen, or a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty-five years and have been fourteen years a resident within the United States.” Every four years, people in the United States elect a new President on a Tuesday followed by first Monday in November. Last year the date fell on November 8, 2016. The American election system is not straightforward, as mere votes do not allow one to win the presidency.

Here is how the system works starting from who can become a presidential candidate to the day, a newly-elected President is inaugurated in five steps:

The Requirements: If one wants to contest for the presidency one has to fulfill the following criteria :

• One should be a natural-born US citizen.
• One has to be 35 years of age.
• One must be a US resident for the past 14 years.

Primaries and Caucuses:
Each candidate is backed by a party and each party has its own believers. The primaries and caucuses help bring these like-minded candidates and believers of a party together to choose a candidate who will represent the party in the general elections. In a way, these are ‘elections before elections’ where one candidate of each party is selected by party believers before they go on to face the general elections. During caucuses, voters divide themselves into groups according to who they support in the party. They then discuss and give speeches to convince others to join their group. Finally, votes are called in and the winner is chosen. These are private meetings organized by political parties.

Delegates:
At the end of every primary or caucus, the candidates of different parties pick up ‘delegates’. Each candidate of a party has to pick up a pre-determined number of delegates to win the nomination. If one wants to become a Democratic party candidate one has to pick up 2,383 of 4,765 delegates. To become a Republican party candidate one has to pick up 1,237 of 2,472 delegates. The question of why the target of the delegate is different for each party needs a long-winding explanation. Delegates are of two types – pledged and pledged.

National Conventions:
Parties hold national conventions to announce the candidate, who has picked up the required number of delegates, as the party’s nominee for the general elections.

If no one has achieved the magic number then the convention becomes a brokered or contested one. The pledged delegates and unpledged delegates come into the spotlight. A contested convention is equivalent to the election of a Pope. Because there was no consensus in the primaries and caucuses, another round of voting is conducted. Wherein ‘pledged delegates usually have to vote for the candidate they were awarded to in the first round of voting, while unpledged delegates don’t. Pledged delegates may be allowed to choose any candidate in subsequent rounds of voting. The voting continues until a consensus emerges and a nominee is finalized.

General Elections:
US citizens vote to choose their President during general elections. But here too they do not choose the president directly. The US follows an indirect method called the electoral college to choose the president. Under this system, citizens vote for a group of people known as electors. And the electors, in turn, choose the president. 
In the electoral college system, each state gets a certain number of electors based on its representation in Congress. There is a total of 538 electoral votes. 
Each political party nominates electors who are state-elected officials, party leaders or persons who have a personal or political affiliation with the presidential candidate. Each selected elector casts one vote following the general election and the candidate who crosses the 270 mark wins. The newly-elected president is inaugurated in January.