Editors note: This stemmed from the mock election.

After months of campaigning, everything comes down to winning 270 electoral votes. Winning 270 electoral votes means being elected President of the United States, for there are 538 electoral votes at stake. Now, as I did, you may have been wondering lately what exactly electoral votes are. The makers of the U.S. Constitution devised an indirect system for electing the President. This system is the Electoral college, which the creators hoped would result in educated and informed people electing our nation’s leader. Today, each political party chooses its own members to serve as electors. Each state has as many electoral votes as they have U.S. Senators (2) and U.S. Representatives, depending on the state’s population. Most states have a winner-take-all policy. The candidate that takes the majority of the popular vote in that state will win all of the electoral votes for that state. For this reason, the states with the most electoral votes at stake will be the states that you hear about in the Presidential campaign the most in the next few days. No matter what the popular vote decides, the winner of the majority of electoral votes will be the victor in the election. This means that one candidate could win the overall popular vote for the United States, but if the other candidate takes more electoral votes they will be elected President. This happened in 2000 when Al Gore won the popular vote by 500,000 votes or more, but George Bush won the majority of electoral votes.

You may have noticed that the candidates spent most of their time in certain states like California, Ohio and Texas. That is because these three states have a larger amount of electoral votes than other states because they have a higher population. California has 55 electoral votes, that’s more than one tenth of all the electoral votes at stake. The winner of this state has a big advantage in the election, which is why so much campaigning is done in California. Some states, like Montana have a very small amount of electoral votes. Montana only has three, which is why you don’t hear much about this state. The little votes do add up, which is why the candidates do campaign here, but usually not directly. They send their vice presidents, or other supporters to campaign for them while they are concentrating on the big ticket states.