American election system

In the U.S., the president is not elected by direct vote, but by an institution called the electoral college. According to the U.S. Constitution, the choice of president and vice depends on your state delegates, which indeed chosen by voters.

Basically each of the 50 states is entitled to a number of delegates proportional to the total number of representatives it has in Congress - one for each congressman and two senators for each. This makes the size and number of states that each candidate has won much weight in the final outcome of the election than the total number of votes made by each.

Explaining better: the day of the presidential election each voter votes for the presidential candidate of your choice. This vote, however, is not computed in a direct election (as in Brazil), but rather, chooses a committee of delegates who will represent their state in the electoral college.

The party of the candidate who wins the most votes in the state elects its committee and the candidate (or candidates) to lose that state gains no delegate. On Monday after the second Wednesday in December elected delegates gather in the capital of your state and then choose the president.

These "special voters" may vote in any name, but usually vote for the candidate for which they were elected. He who receive more than half of electoral votes is declared the new president and assumes the 6th of January of the year following the election.

On only two occasions, the the decision of the Electoral College was different from that seen in the polls. The most recent of these was in 2000, when George W. Bush got 47.87%, against 48.38% of the Democratic candidate, Al Gore, that even with 500 000 votes more stayed away from the White House.

Voting

Besides the electoral college another American institution that causes much confusion in the elections is a very particular voting system. The country simply does not have a national electoral system.

Each state chooses the best way to compute and count their votes. In 2000, for example, the vote took almost a month to be announced because Florida had a type of ballot that led thousands of voters to vote wrong. With a minimal difference between the candidates, those few votes that were recounted manually, had the power to decide the election.

Source: Terra