By Lamin Njie
Foreign journalists covering US elections 2020 have been taken through America’s electoral system – officially raising the curtain on an eight-week virtual reporting tour program.
The United States government through the Foreign Press Centers is partnering with Meridian International to bring the world closer to its elections in November, by relying on journalists around the world to explain the moment to their countries and peoples.
On Monday, Lamin Njie (Editor in chief, The Fatu Network), Kebba Jeffang (The Chronicle) and Fatoumata Ceesay (GRTS) joined over 220 journalists that have been selected by the US government through its Embassies and Consulates in a maiden press briefing where they got introduced to the US electoral system.
“We’re a federal system. The founders of our Republic decentralised authority significantly, in creating a constitutional system, which means they gave an enormous amount of independent power and authority to state and local governments,” Dr Mark J. Rozell who is a founding dean at the Schar School of Policy and Government, George Mason University in Arlington Virginia told foreign reporters during the press briefing on Monday.
The system is the outcome of an 18th century constitution, with the idea centering around fracturing power in many different directions in order to ensure no one group holds all the power in the country.
“There was very deep distrust at that time of central government authority. Remember we had been under British monarchy and those who founded our republic did not want strongly centralised authority and therefore they gave a lot of independent power to sub-national units,” Dr Rozell said.
America’s electoral system is somewhat different from that of many federal democracies around the world; the country elects a president according to each state.
“We don’t have as you know, a national popular vote for the presidency. We have a national popular vote total that says that Hillary Clinton got three million more votes than Donald Trump or in the year 2000 that Al Gore got a half million more votes than George W Bush,” Dr Rozell said
“But we have what is called a state-by-state, winner-takes-all system where each state is assigned a number of electors to our electoral college and a candidate who wins the popular vote within each state takes 100pc of electors to the electoral college,” he said. The electoral college has 538 votes and a candidate must get 270 votes in order to win the election.
The November 3 poll is one of the most important political events in America – coming when the world is battling the deadly coronavirus pandemic.
America is one of the countries that have been hit hardest by the disease; the New York Times reported on Monday, relying on its database, that more than 6,825,700 people people been infected with the virus as of Monday morning and at least 199,300 200 people have died.
While the public health aspect is weighing heavily on the election, the economic turmoil in the form of the US economy shrinking and millions of people losing their jobs, has also proven to be a key campaign issue for both President Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
Other issues like social justice and now the death of foremost Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg all matter in the election.
