By Lamin Njie
Nearly 100 million people have voted early in US presidential election in which Democrat Joe Biden is seeking to stop President Donald Trump from winning a fresh four-year term.
More than 61.5 million people have cast their ballot through mail while more than 31.9 million have voted in-person, according to figures by CNN.
Both Trump and Biden are now trapped in last-minute pushes in key battleground states; Trump on Sunday held rallies in five states, in Michigan, Iowa, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida. Biden was in the important state of Pennsylvania.
While millions of people have already chosen between the two men, it’s the 270 electoral college votes that will ensure either men the White House.
Dr Lonna Rae Atkeson told foreign reporters while the popular vote ‘mostly’ aligns with the electoral college, five presidents including Donald Trump became president thanks to the electoral college.
“Historically, since we’ve been doing polling, we use the popular vote to predict the Electoral College vote. And that mostly works, 53 out of 58 contests have successfully… The popular vote has aligned with the Electoral College vote,” Rae Atkeson who is a professor and regents’ lecturer in Political Science at the University of New Mexico said.
“But there are five presidents who did not win the popular vote who served as president. There were John Quincy Adams in 1824, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016,” she said.
America operates a system whereby a group of officials are handed the joint task of indirectly choosing the president and the vice president. They come from all 50 states in the country and each state has as much electoral college officials as its size.
A candidate in this year’s election must win at least 270 of the 538 electoral college votes to win the race.
