5 Big Questions About Voting

Not all of them. Today there are about 150 million registered voters in the U.S. They include women, men, and people of all races. But that wasn’t always the case. When George Washington was elected in 1789, only about 6 percent of the population was allowed to vote, and they were mostly white men who owned land.

For more than 100 years after that, Black people, women, and Indigenous people fought for the right to vote. But even when a group was granted suffrage, they didn’t always get to vote. For example, laws in some states prevented Black people from voting for decades after they legally won the right.

In a class election, each student votes for a candidate. The person who gets the majority, or more than half, of the votes, wins. This is called a popular vote.

But in a national election, a group called the Electoral College officially elects our president. Each state has a certain number of electors—people who have promised to vote for a specific candidate. On November 3, voters will choose a candidate’s name on a ballot, but they’re really voting for electors. In most states, the candidate who gets the most votes wins all of that state’s electors. To win, a candidate must get at least 270 electoral votes.

People in the U.S. mostly vote in one of two ways at their local polling place. In some places, people fill out a paper ballot. In others, people check boxes on a computer screen.

Kimberly Wehle is the author of a book called What You Need to Know About Voting and Why. She says no matter how a person votes, the most important thing is that they do vote.

“If we don’t vote, we’re allowing other people to decide who the leaders are,” she says.

Although most people in the U.S. usually vote in person, not everyone can. For instance, many members of the U.S. military will be away from home. That’s why some form of mail-in, or absentee, voting is allowed in every state and Washington, D.C. And five states hold their elections almost entirely by mail.

Due to concerns about Covid-19, more Americans than ever are expected to vote by mail this year to avoid crowded polling places. President Donald Trump has suggested that mail-in voting could lead to voter fraud, or people voting more than once. But studies have shown that fewer than 1 percent of votes in the 2016 presidential election resulted in fraud.

“It’s actually really, really rare because most people aren’t going to risk going to jail for five years to cast one fake vote,” says Wehle.