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| Mark Piquette, left, votes early Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2020, at Waukesha City Hall. Angela Major/WPR |
Wisconsin Voters Are Casting Ballots To Determine The Fate Of 10 Electoral Votes For The Presidency
In an election cycle stained with political unrest, Nov. 3's approach feels like a white flag waving. But while Tuesday will mark the end of belligerent mailings and commercials, pollster phone calls and text messages, the process to name the nation's next president is really just getting started.
That's because the general election — where people flock to the polls and county clerks spend hours opening, vetting and counting absentee ballots — determines the popular vote, and then it's up to the state electors to cast their own votes to ultimately decide the next president.
And as the Electoral College's significance comes into focus after Tuesday, so will Wisconsin's role in it.
The Electoral College is a system governing the election of a president and vice president where appointed people in each state cast ballots that determine the winners. Often, but not always, the votes that are cast are reflective of whichever candidate wins the state's popular vote.
It was built into the U.S. Constitution and has been around for hundreds of years. It's also a system that has been lambasted as undemocratic. There have been a few times in history when a man has been cast into the presidency who didn't actually win the popular vote.
Most recently, questions over the legitimacy and fairness of the Electoral College surfaced after President Donald Trump's upset in 2016, when he won the office with 306 electoral votes to Hillary Clinton's 232, at the same time that Clinton won the popular vote by about 2 percent.
Some analysts agree Trump isn't likely to win the popular vote this year, but say that he could win a second term by way of the Electoral College in a 2016 redux.
Read more: https://www.wpr.org/wisconsins-role-electoral-college-explained
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