United States

Voters indirectly elect the president and vice president through the electoral college. Instead of choosing a candidate, voters actually choose electors committed to support a particular candidate. Each state is allotted one electoral vote for each of its senators and representatives in Congress; the Twenty-third Amendment (1961) granted electoral votes to the District of Columbia, which does not have congressional representation. A candidate must win a majority (270) of the 538 electoral votes to be elected president. If no candidate wins a majority, the House of Representatives selects the president, with each state delegation receiving one vote; the Senate elects the vice president if no vice presidential candidate secures an electoral college majority. A candidate may lose the popular vote but be elected president by winning a majority of the electoral vote (as George W. Bush did in the U.S. presidential election of 2000), though such inversions are rare. Presidential elections are costly and generate much media and public attention—sometimes years before the actual date of the general election. Indeed, some presidential aspirants have declared their candidacies years in advance of the first primaries and caucuses, and some White House hopefuls drop out of the grueling process long before the first votes are cast.

A certificate from Alabama showing the signatures of the state's electors in 2000. The nine electors voted for George W. Bush. Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration

Voting in the United States is not compulsory, and, in contrast to most other Western countries, voter turnout is quite low. In the late 20th and the early 21st century, about 50 percent of Americans cast ballots in presidential elections; turnout was even lower for congressional and state and local elections, with participation dropping under 40 percent for most congressional midterm elections (held midway through a president’s four-year term). Indeed, in some local elections (such as school board elections or bond issues) and primaries or caucuses, turnout has sometimes fallen below 10 percent. High abstention rates led to efforts to encourage voter participation by making voting easier. For example, in 1993 Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act (the so-called “motor-voter law”), which required states to allow citizens to register to vote when they received their driver’s licenses, and in 1998 voters in Oregon approved a referendum that established a mail-in voting system. In addition, some states now allow residents to register to vote on election day, polls are opened on multiple days and in multiple locations in some states, and Internet voting has even been introduced on a limited basis for some elections.

Money and campaigns

Campaigns for all levels of office are expensive in the United States compared with those in most other democratic countries. In an attempt to reduce the influence of money in the political process, reforms were instituted in the 1970s that required public disclosure of contributions and limited the amounts of contributions to candidates for federal office. Individuals were allowed to contribute directly to a candidate no more than $1,000 in so-called “hard money” (i.e., money regulated by federal election law) per candidate per election. The law, however, allowed labour unions, corporations, political advocacy groups, and political parties to raise and spend unregulated “soft money,” so long as funds were not spent specifically to support a candidate for federal office (in practice, this distinction was often blurry). Because there were no limits on such soft money, individuals or groups could contribute to political parties any sum at their disposal or spend limitlessly to advocate policy positions (often to the benefit or detriment of particular candidates). In the 2000 election cycle, it is estimated that more than $1 billion was spent by the Democratic and Republican parties and candidates for office, with more than two-fifths of this total coming from soft money contributions.

Concerns about campaign financing led to the passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (popularly called the “McCain-Feingold law” for its two chief sponsors in the Senate, Republican John McCain and Democrat Russell Feingold), which banned national political parties from raising soft money. The law also increased the amount individuals could contribute to candidates (indexing the amount for inflation) and prevented interest groups from broadcasting advertisements that specifically referred to a candidate within 30 days of a primary election and 60 days of a general election.