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New York, Nov. 7 (Xinhua) -- As many U.S. citizens are going to polling places to vote for the next president of the United States in November, their votes do not matter as much as they are led to believe, said U.S. media reports.
Citizens of the United States do not directly elect the president or the vice president; the Electoral College does, which is a process provided by the U.S. constitution based on the concept that people could not or should not be trusted to vote directly for a national leader.
Rational as the "indirect method" may have been at one time, it has come to seem anachronistic in the extreme, said an NPR report.
The most egregious fault in the system is the prospect of a nationwide popular vote winner actually losing in the Electoral College, it said, citing the recent example in 2000 when George W. Bush was declared the winner with 271 votes in the Electoral College though Al Gore got 48.4 percent of the popular vote to 47.9 for Bush.
If the Electoral College fails to produce a majority, then the president will be chosen by the House of Representatives, which is a vote of the 50 state delegations with each state having one vote.
This, too, strikes many as unfair, not to mention flagrantly undemocratic, said the NPR report.
The constitution, written in 1787 and amended several times since, respects the rights of states as entities unto themselves. But the framers did not envision population disparities between the states reaching 100 to 1 and beyond, it added.
In a presidential election, some states in the United States are considered "safe states" and others as "swing states."
Safe states are those that have historically proven to always vote in favor of the candidate of a particular party. Safe states for Republicans include Texas, Arizona, Georgia and Indiana, while for Democrats, they are New York, California, Maryland, Illinois and Washington, according to a report by Huffington Post.
Swing states are states that have historically maintained equal support for the candidates of both parties, so they are viewed as crucial in deciding the outcome of an election. Swing states include Florida, Ohio, New Hampshire, Virginia and Colorado, it said.
Therefore a Republican's vote in Maryland really does not matter and a Democrat's vote in Texas is worthless, but if you are a resident of a swing state, your vote is much more important than the vote of an individual in a safe state, it said.
"This is because under an Electoral College voting process, an individual vote is only as valuable as its ability to influence the majority vote of a state," it added.
The Electoral College is an election process and a compromise between election of the U.S. president by a vote in Congress and election of the president by a popular vote of qualified citizens, according to the Election College official website.
The Electoral College process consists of the selection of the electors, the meeting of the electors where they vote for president and vice president, and the counting of the electoral votes by U.S. congress, it said.
The number of electors in each state is equal to the number of members of U.S. congress to which the state is entitled, with the exception of the District of Columbia, which is granted the same number of electors as the least populous state, currently three.
There are now 538 electors, corresponding to the 435 Representatives and 100 Senators, plus three additional electors from the District of Columbia. A majority of 270 votes is required to elect the U.S. president.
In most states, all of their electors pledge to vote for the presidential candidate who wins the most votes in that state, except for Maine and Nebraska in which the state winner receives two electors and the winner of each congressional district receives one.
The electors are not required by federal law to honor a pledge, but there have been very few occasions when an elector voted contrary to a pledge.
