March 24, 2000
By Jerome A. DeHerrera
Readers of this newspaper have all read or heard that the Latino vote is going to be critical in this year's presidential election. But what does that mean?
In order to understand how politicians and the media are changing their perceptions of the Latino voter, it is necessary to understand something very old and very complex: Something called the Electoral College.
The Electoral College is not a school or a university. It is a term given to a peculiar system set up by the Constitution that allows a group of individuals to elect a president for us. What? You mean my vote does not elect the President of the United States directly? That's right. Every voter in the country votes indirectly for their candidate to become President. Here's how:
When we vote in November, what we are actually doing is instructing a group of individuals (electors) on whom they should elect as president. Only in very few cases do these individuals—prominent persons selected by the governor of a state weeks after we have voted in November— not vote for the candidate who won the election.
The system was set up this way as an insurance policy so that a group of leaders could choose a President in case of fraud or if a candidate elected as president in November proved to be too dangerous or died before he was inaugurated in January.
Under this archaic but good system, each state gets a number of electors. There are 538 electors as set by the Constitution, and each of the 50 states gets a certain number of electors based on the size of a state's population. The vote that each elector can cast is called an electoral vote and when all the electors meet they are called the Electoral College. It takes 270 electoral votes to win an election.
California is the state with the largest population, so it gets 54 electoral votes. New York is the next largest state with electoral votes but it is only a little bit more than half as large as California, so it gets 33 electoral votes. Texas is next with 32. Florida follows with 25, and on down the line until we get to the last state, Wyoming, which gets three electoral votes.
When the people of the state vote, the candidate for president who wins the largest number of popular votes in a state wins all of the state's electoral votes. So if Vice President Gore won the most votes in California, he would get all of its 52 electoral votes. If Gov. George Bush of Texas won the most votes in his home state of Texas, he would win all of its 32 electoral votes.
So, the big states like California, Texas, New York and Florida are very important. That is why the Latino vote is attracting so much attention. Most of us live in these big states.
These four states generate 144 of the 270 electoral states a candidate needs, and that is more than half.
But other states where a lot of Latinos live are important, too, because their electoral votes are necessary to reach the magical 270 mark. That is why Latinos living in states like Illinois (22 votes), Colorado (8), New Mexico (5), Arizona (8), Washington (11) are so crucial.
It is strange system but it works, and it sure is working to make Latinos important in this election. And as the Latino population grows, the Electoral College will makes us even more important.
DeHerrera writes a political column from Washington. Please send your comments to JeromeDeHerrera@Yahoo.com
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