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Your Vote

When you go to the polls and place your vote (remember the dreaded "hanging chads?"), you aren't technically picking the candidate of your choice, but rather a slate of electors who have pledged to vote for that particular candidate when the Electoral College meets.

Electoral College?

The candidates are competing for 538 state electors and the one who wins more than half of these electors -270, will be the next U.S. President. The Electoral College convenes in December to formalize the election results -but most likely we will all know who has won soon after the polls are closed.

Electors?

The number of electors from each state equals the number of senators and representatives the state sends to Congress. If no candidate receives 270 electors, the House of Representatives will then decide who the next president will be.

I Swear.

The Presidential Inaugural Ceremony takes place on the Capitol steps on January 20, 2009.

More Election Terms

By now, you've probably heard the terms caucus and primary a million times. Iowa held caucuses while New Hampshire had primaries. Both events have helped shape the Democratic and Republican races for the presidential nomination. So what's the difference, anyway?

More than half of the states use the primary system. In most cases, a primary involves a trip to your local polling place where you vote for your candidate of choice. Close the curtain, check the box, touch the screen, or move the lever, and you're done. It's quick, private and can be done anytime while the polls are open. Some states require people to register their party affiliation and those folks get to vote in their party's primary. Other states let voters select a party to vote on at the polling place. Your vote helps determine the number of delegates your candidate will receive. The state's delegates will vote at the political party's national convention to determine its candidate.

Caucuses are more complicated because they require party members to get together to select delegates for their candidates. You and your neighbors and fellow party members have to meet somewhere-usually a public facility like a school or government building-at an appointed time and some attendees may give speeches about the candidates. Like a primary, the party members vote for their candidate of choice and the distribution of delegates based on their votes.

And what's with conventions?

Although a convention may appear to be not much more than a rockin' good time, it serves a vital function in our political process. During the national conventions -Democratic and Republican -each party chooses their official nominee to be President of the United States. Once the primary votes are tallied, each states' political parties pick delegates to reflect that state's vote-dictated preferences. Each major candidate will have convention delegates, with more delegates awarded the winner of the most votes in the primaries, fewer delegates for the second-place finisher, and so on. The eventual party nominee will be the candidate who has garnered the most votes from the delegates. So, the more delegates you are able to send to your party's convention, the more likely you are to win the nomination.