Definition of Electoral College

The concept we are analyzing has two different meanings. On the one hand, in Spanish culture it refers to the center where voting takes place in an electoral process. On the other hand, it refers to the electoral system used in the United States.

Electoral system in the United States

The founding fathers of the nation they considered that in a country so extensive electoral campaigns could not focus on the largest states, since the risk that they ended up having much more power. In this way, a model was created so that the president and vice president were not directly elected by the vote popular. This model is known as college electoral.

An electoral college is a group of representatives from each state. These representatives are the ones who finally vote for the presidential and vice-presidential candidate. The electoral college is made up of a total of 538 electors representing all states. Thus, to win an election, the candidates for the presidency and the vice-presidency must have the vote of half of the electors of the electoral college, that is, 270 votes.

The number of voters that corresponds to each state is determined by the number of congressmen (for example, California has 55 electoral votes, New York 29 and Montana 3). To this system must be added another circumstance: the candidate who gets the most popular votes takes all the votes of the electors assigned to each state.

This system tries to respect the will of the majority of the people. However, this model is not exempt from criticism, since the minority vote does not have any representation final in the House of Representatives and with this system power bipartisanship.

The electoral colleges in Spain

In the law Spanish electoral process explains everything related to the candidate election processes. One of the aspects is precisely the organization of the elections. In this sense, the law specifies the functions of the electoral boards, how the electoral roll should be carried out, who can vote, who can stand and, ultimately, everything related to an election democratic.

An important section in this entire process is related to the physical space in which citizens cast their vote. These places are the polling stations. In them, some booths must be set up so that the vote can be totally secret and, in addition, all the electoral ballots must be exposed in a fair manner. The electoral college is usually any public building and normally the most used modality is some center of teaching.

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