The American election by the numbers

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Swing states, electoral college votes, candidates up and down the ballot, and millions of potential voters: here’s the American election, broken down by the numbers.

Several independents ran – and at least one, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., stumbled upon a series of eyebrow-raising headlines.

But ultimately, the presidential election comes down to a binary choice, with the two candidates from the major parties – Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump – seeking to lead a polarized America.

November 5 – Election Day, traditionally held on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November.

The number of swing states — those that don’t clearly favor one party over the other, meaning they’re up for grabs.

Harris and Trump are courting voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and are concentrating their campaign efforts there in an effort to secure victory.

In a close election, just a handful of votes in any of these states could decide the outcome.

Voters will not only decide who will live in the White House on Election Day – they will also press update on the US Congress.

Thirty-four Senate seats and all 435 seats in the House of Representatives are up for grabs.

In the House, the members sit for a period of two years. Republicans currently hold the majority, and Harris’ Democrats will be hoping for a turnaround.

In the Senate, 34 seats out of 100 are vacant for a six-year term. The Republicans hope to overthrow the narrow Democratic majority.

Welcome to the Electoral College, the indirect system of universal suffrage that governs US presidential elections.

Each state has a different number of electors—calculated by adding the number of their elected representatives in the House, which varies by population, to the number of senators (two per state).

Rural Vermont, for example, has only three electoral votes. Giant California, meanwhile, has 54.

There are a total of 538 electors spread across the 50 states and the District of Columbia. To occupy the White House, a candidate must win 270 votes.

The number of poll workers who volunteered to help ensure the 2020 election ran smoothly, according to the Pew Research Center.

There are three types of election staff in the United States.

The majority are poll workers — recruited to do things like greet voters, help with language, set up polling equipment and verify voter IDs and registrations.

Election officials are elected, hired or appointed to perform more specialized tasks such as training poll workers, according to Pew.

Pollsters are usually appointed by political parties to observe the vote count – expected to be particularly contentious this year, thanks to Trump’s refusal to agree to unconditionally accept the result.

Many election officials have already spoken to AFP about the pressure and threats they are receiving ahead of the November 5 vote.

Harris’ team spent $270 million on her campaign in September, while Trump spent much less — just $78 million, official filings show.

According to the New York Times, Harris’ campaign set a record for the biggest fundraising quarter ever this fall, raising $1 billion since entering the race following Joe Biden’s withdrawal in July.

The number of Americans who will be eligible to vote in 2024, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.

How many of them will actually cast their vote remains to be seen, of course. But the Pew Research Center says the 2018 and 2022 midterm elections and the 2020 presidential vote produced three of the highest turnouts of their kind seen in the United States in decades.

“About two-thirds (66%) of the eligible voting population turned out for the 2020 presidential election – the highest rate for a national election since 1900,” Pew says on its website.

That translated to nearly 155 million voters, according to the Census Bureau.

As of Oct. 27, more than 41 million Americans had voted early, according to a University of Florida database.

Most US states allow in-person or mail-in voting to allow people to deal with scheduling conflicts or the inability to cast their ballots on Election Day itself, November 5.

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