Hi
Lets flow with the groove of US election by learning few interesting stuffs about how they elect their President.

The first thing to know is that while we Nigerians elect our President directly through popular votes, that of America is quite different and much more complicated.
Put simply, Americans elect their President through what is called "Electoral College". That is, Americans will first of all select some group of people from each State according to the size of the States...then these selected people will be the one to elect the next American President.

To explain further...

US Presidential elections aren't the same as our elections - for a start they vote for their Congressmen and women separately from the president.
And even then it's not quite as simple as "first past the post".
It may seem a pretty convoluted way to decide who runs the country.

But it's not that hard to get your head around, and it mostly makes sense.
You can even be the most popular person at the election night party by explaining it to everybody else.
Here's our guide to how America will decide who won.

The US founding fathers decided they wanted a "buffer" between the population ant the selection of a President. They feared a tyrant would be able to manipulate public opinion and seize power.
They also had to make a compromise with some of the small states, who felt they would lose influence because of their small population.
So how does it work?
Each state gets a certain number of "electors" - essentially votes - which is roughly proportional to the size and population of the state.
Most states award their electoral votes on a "winner take all" basis. So if most people vote Democrat in Florida, the Democrats get their 29 electoral votes.
Maine and Nebraska dish their votes out proportionally.
In total there are 538 electoral votes spread across the states, and a candidate needs a majority of 270 of them to win.

If they get less than a majority, Congress gets to pick.
Technically the electors are actually people, who cast a vote each for president and vice president, but in reality, they usually go with how the state votes. There have only been a handful of occasions where an elector has gone rogue, and it's never decided an election.

Has anyone ever won the popular vote and lost the election?

There certainly have, most recently in the 2000 election, where Al Gore won the popular vote by about half a million votes, but still lost out to George W Bush when the courts decided he’d won Florida.
Before him, Benjamin Harrison denied Grover Cleveland a second term in 1888, despite getting a narrow majority in the popular vote.
Rutherford B Hayes was outpolled by Samuel J Tilden in the 1876 election, but ended up striking a bargain and winning the presidency after a massive row over electoral votes.
And John Quincy Adams (1824) won neither the popular contest nor the electoral vote - but because neither won a majority of electoral votes the House of Representatives got to pick the winner.
They decided to make Adams the President, and rival Andrew Jackson was rather upset about it. He proclaimed the election of Adams a “corrupt bargain.”

I drop the pen here. And I hope u av bin able to learn one or two things.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/what-electoral-college-how-work-9177613

Nice
You can still explain more on the college vote.

DAramis:
Nice

You can still explain more on the college vote.

No problem. What part do u want me to explain

abiodunalasa:


No problem. What part do u want me to explain

Like....
***how many voters elect the electoral colleges?
***early voting system.
***swing states and their voting pattern (like Kano and delta states being a swing state in Nigeria based on the no of votes it gave each of the parties.)
*** what to watch out for.
***lastly, any online site to follow the election just like we have Sahara reporters site that gave detailed results for Nigerian election.

Thanks.