What is voting? Why (and how) do people vote? Why can’t kids vote? Why are there red and blue states (not to mention donkeys and elephants representing political parties)? How can someone win the most votes but still lose the presidential election? We’re answering kid questions about elections with Bridgett King, a political scientist at the University of Kentucky.
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- Voting allows citizens to actively participate in their democracy.
- We vote for many different things in the United States. Sometimes we are electing (choosing) people for offices. Sometimes we vote to approve a budget for things like cities and schools. Sometimes we vote on specific issues.
- To vote you have to be registered. That means you have to declare you want to vote and that you are eligible so you can be added to the list of voters where you live.
- You have to be 18 to vote in most elections. In some states, 17 year olds can vote in primary elections if they’ll be 18 by the date of the general election.
- If you go to the polling place on an election day you will be given a paper ballot to mark your choices. If you get a mail-in ballot, you will mark your ballot at home and take it back to the polling place or put it in the mail.
- Poll workers are mostly volunteers who work under the supervision of elected officials.
- In the presidential election–and only the presidential election–there is a step in between the votes cast by voters and the outcome of the election. This extra step, or process, is called the electoral college. After each state counts their total votes, a small group of people called electors, then represent the voters and cast their votes for the person their state citizens want to have as the president.
- There are a total of 538 people in the electoral college. You need to get more than half of those votes–at least 270–to be president.
- Not every state has the same number of electoral votes. The number of electors is based on the number of Senators and Representatives in each state (plus the District of Columbia), which is based on the size of the state. So states with more people get more votes.
- The media tends to use blue to represent states that vote mostly for Democratic candidates and use red for states that mostly vote for Republican candidates. Someone chose those colors for the parties and now most people use them. Often when you see maps with different colored states it is a representation of the electoral college.
- Red states and blue states only became popular descriptors in the 2000 election.
