How Does California Select Its Electors
On or before October 1 of the presidential election year, each party’s nominee must file a list containing the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of the 55 electors pledges to him/her. Each party determines its own method for selecting electors.
In the Democratic Party, each congressional nominee and each US Senate nominee designates one elector. Elections Code section 7100
In the Republican Party, the nominees for Governor, Lt. Governor, Treasurer, Controller, Attorney General, Secretary of State, U.S. Senate at the last two elections, Assembly Republican leader, Senate Republican leader, all elected officers of the Republican State Central Committee, national committeemen/women, President of Republican County Central Committee Chairmen’s Association, and chair or President of each Republican volunteer organization officially recognized by the Republican State Central Committee shall be electors. U.S. Senators, Representatives in Congress and persons holding office of trust or profit of the U.S. may not be electors. Any additional vacancies shall be filled by appointment of the chair of Republican State Central Committee according to Republican State Central Committee bylaws. Republican State Central Committee Chair must file the list with the Secretary of State by October 1 of the presidential election year. Elections Code section 7300
Los Angeles County Cast More Ballots Than 38 States
As of Friday, Nov. 13, 4,261,742 votes had been cast and processed in the county, according to the office of Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan. That is more votes, according to New York Times election data tracking, than had been tabulated in the battleground state of Arizona . It is more than three times the number of ballots cast in Nevada .
Los Angeles County, with approximately 10 million residents, has 5.8 million registered voters, according to Logans office. This year, the spread of the coronavirus prompted Padilla in early October to send ballots to every voter in the state. Despite concerns about the reliability of the United States Postal Service, nearly 80% of voters in the county participated by mail.
United States Presidential Election In California
The 2020 United States presidential election in California was held on Tuesday, November 3, 2020, as part of the 2020 United States presidential election in which all 50 states plus the District of Columbia participated.California voters chose electors to represent them in the Electoral College via a popular vote, pitting the Republican Party‘s nominee, incumbent President Donald Trump, and running mate Vice PresidentMike Pence against Democratic Party nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his running mate Kamala Harris, the junior senator from California. California had, in the 2020 election 55 electoral votes in the Electoral College, the most of any state. Prior to the election, most news organizations considered California a strongly Democratic state, or a safe blue state. It has voted Democratic in every presidential election from 1992 onward. California was one of six states where Trump received more percentage of the two-party vote than he did in 2016. This election also marked the first time since 2004 that the Republican candidate won more than one million votes in Los Angeles County, due to increased turnout statewide.
California was one of five states in the nation in which Biden’s victory margin was larger than 1 million raw votes, the others being New York, , Massachusetts and Illinois. Also, over 5 million of Biden’s 7 million lead were Californian votes. Trump lost California by 29 points in 2020, an improvement over his 30-point loss in 2016.
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Trump Launches A Legal Barrage In An Effort To Block A Biden Victory
As his path to another term narrowed sharply, President Trump sent in the lawyers Wednesday, seeking to stop or reverse vote counts in three battleground states.
But now we know for sure what Trump is. In 2020, these voters in addition to a whole lot of white people opted to reelect a man who held a news conference in which he called a bunch of tiki-torch-carrying racists very fine people, tossed innocent migrant children into cages and, out of spite, rolled back civil rights for transgender Americans.
And these voters are real people. Real Californians. Real Angelenos. I spoke to several of them on Tuesday evening, while polls were closing on the East Coast, as they gathered for yet another Trump rally in Beverly Hills. The diversity of the crowd was as surprising as it was disturbing.
President Trump Officially Has Received More Votes Than Barack Obama Ever Did
The messy, disputed 2020 presidential election will go into the record books for something more than the number of lawsuits engendered by the decision by many states to adopt mass mail-in ballots.
President Donald Trump became the first sitting president to top 70 million votes, with a total of 70,812,803 as of incomplete and unofficial returns posted on Fox News as of Sunday afternoon.
He also moves ahead of former President Barack Obama, who received 69,498,516 votes in the 2008 presidential election, according to the Federal Election Commission.
Obamas mark had been the record for any presidential candidate until this election.
Trump noted his achievement on Twitter, and also shared his contention that it should have been enough to win.
Donald J. Trump
Obama was unable to increase that when he ran in 2012, totaling 62,615,406 when he defeated Republican candidate Mitt Romney, now a U.S. Senator from Utah, according to NBC.
After all, Trump received 62,984,828 votes to win the 2016 election, according to the Federal Election Commission.
Not only does that put Trump ahead of Obama, he also stands ahead of other Republicans in the popular vote.
Romney received about 59 million votes, according to NBC.
Former President Ronald Reagan, in his 1984 landslide victory, polled slightly less than 54.5 million votes, according to The New York Times.
Some noted that Trumps turnout was an incredible achievement.
Stephi Connolly
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If Los Angeles Were A State
The local figures pose an interesting question: How many electoral college votes might Los Angeles County hold if it were its own entity?
The answer cannot be definitively determined by raw vote count. Electoral college votes are distributed on a state-by-state basis, and align to each states cumulative number of House and Senate representatives, which itself is tied to population levels determined by the U.S. Census results.
The Senate component alone, with two for the entire state, is part of why one cant just separate Los Angeles or any county from the whole of California. Additionally, every state has densely populated urban areas that hold a high number of voters.
Still, examining the sheer numbers can be instructive, and Los Angeles County stands out for its heft. By Friday afternoon, the countys vote total was slightly higher than the 4,024,253 ballots that had been tabulated in the state of Washington, which has 12 electoral college votes.
Of the 11 states with more votes cast than Los Angeles County, the closest is Virginia, where 4.4 million ballots had been tabulated. Virginia has 13 electoral college votes.
How Counties Shifted From 2016
In 2016, one of the keys to Trumps victory was increasing the share of Republican votes in many counties across the U.S., particularly in the Midwest. The shift from 2016 to 2020 shows a much more complex picture. While many places continued to show growth in the Republican share of votes, others reversed course and shifted back toward Democrats, notably in key battleground states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia.
Karina Zaiets, Dan Keemahill, Kevin Crowe and Dian Zhang contributed to this report.
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Voters Turned Out In Record Numbers
This year, nearly 150 million people cast a ballot and according to the U.S. Elections Project, we are on track to see the highest voter turnout for a presidential election in over a century. Most counties in America saw higher turnout than in 2016, including many in the battleground states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia.
In some counties, like many in New York and California, the number of votes cast appears to have fallen. However, this may change as these places have been slower to complete counting ballots and the numbers will continue to climb in the coming days.
Heres How California Representatives Voted On Certifying Bidens Election And Who Is Calling For Trumps Removal
Electoral college votes are brought as Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Vice President Mike Pence officiate as a joint session of the House and Senate reconvenes to confirm the Electoral College votes at the Capitol, Jan 6, 2021.
Erin Schaff/The New York Times via AP, Pool
Most of Californias Democratic Congressional Delegation is calling for President Donald Trumps immediate removal from office after thousands of his supporters swarmed the U.S. Capitol Wednesday, interrupting a joint session and forcing members of Congress and their staff into lockdown.
The President of the United States incited an armed insurrection against America, said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The San Francisco Democrat urged Vice President Mike Pence and members of Trumps cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment and declare the president unfit to hold the office.
If the Vice President and cabinet do not act, the congress may be prepared to move forward with impeachment. That is the overwhelming sentiment of my caucus, Pelosi said.
The 25th Amendmentlays out a framework for succeeding a president or declaring him unfit for office, but it has never been used to remove a sitting commander-in-chief.
The calls for Trumps removal come after Congress affirmed President-elect Joe Bidens electoral college victory early Thursday morning, ensuring Biden will be inaugurated.
Seven California Republicans Object To Certifying Biden’s Election
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Why Does It Matter
Wisconsin sided with the Democratic candidate in all presidential elections from 1988 through 2012, although sometimes by very narrow margins. In 2016, Trump managed to flip the state despite his underdog status in the polls.
Americans are also electing members to the two chambers of Congress, the main law-making body of the US. Those chambers are the Senate and the House of Representatives.
Without support in the Senate and the House, the president’s ability to enact key policies is severely limited.
The winner of the election is determined through a system called the electoral college. Each of the 50 states, plus Washington DC, is given a number of electoral college votes, adding up to a total of 538 votes. More populous states get more electoral college votes than smaller ones.
A candidate needs to win 270 electoral college votes to win the election.
In every state except two Maine and Nebraska the candidate that gets the most votes wins all of the states electoral college votes.
Due to these rules, a candidate can win the election without getting the most votes at the national level. This happened at the last election, in which Donald Trump won a majority of electoral college votes although more people voted for Hillary Clinton across the US.
How Do We Elect The President
Unlike in most elections, the person who becomes president is not necessarily the candidate who wins the most votes on Election Day. Instead, the election of the president of the United States is a two-step process.
First, voters cast ballots on Election Day in each state. In nearly every state, the candidate who gets the most votes wins the “electoral votes” for that state, and gets that number of voters in the “Electoral College.”
Second, the “electors” from each of the 50 states gather in December and they vote for president. The person who receives a majority of votes from the “Electoral College” becomes President.
How exactly does this work? Under the “Electoral College” system, each state is assigned a certain number of “votes”. There are a total of 538 electoral votes, and the number of votes each state receives is proportional to its size — the bigger the state’s population the more “votes” it gets. The formula for determining the number of votes for each state is simple: each state gets two votes for its two US Senators, and then one more additional vote for each member it has in the House of Representatives. For California, this means we get 55 votes — the most of any state.
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California Can’t And Won’t Dominate A National Popular Vote For President
SUMMARY:
There is no more reason to worry about California dominating the nationwide outcome than to worry about the fact that the south-central states have the same population as California and gave Trump the same percentage of its vote and same popular-vote margin as California gave Clinton in 2016. Under National Popular Vote, a vote is a vote, regardless of state boundaries.
There is a Republican-leaning area in the south-central part of the country that has the same population as California and that gave Trump essentially the same percentage of its vote as California gave Clinton in 2016.
It is a fact that California has about 37 million people and that it gave Hillary Clinton 62% of its vote and a popular-vote margin of 4.3 million votes in 2016. It is also a fact that California is counter-balanced by an equally populous Republican area in the south-central part of the country with 37 million people that gave Trump essentially the same percentage of its vote and essentially the same popular-vote margin .
Political talking points about alternative universes in which certain voters are removed undermine political discourse. Every loser in every election would have won if some carefully selected portion of the other candidates voters were excluded from the vote count.
for full memo on why California would not dominate a National Popular Vote for President
- The national popular vote winner should become President
- One-person, one-vote
California Republican Turnout Not High Enough To Boot Newsom
LOS ANGELES Republicans, vastly outnumbered by Democrats in California, needed a huge turnout in this weeks recall election to have any chance of removing Gov. Gavin Newsom from office. It didnt happen.
About 9.2 million votes were counted Tuesday and an estimated 2.9 million were still left to tally. That suggests overall turnout was around 55%, about average for a California midterm election and way below the 80% that voted in the 2020 presidential race.
Last year, then-President Donald Trump received more votes than any Republican presidential candidate in state history over 6 million but was trounced by Democrat Joe Biden, who collected more than 11 million.
Early polling in the recall contest suggested Republicans were highly motivated to remove Newsom in the rare, late-summer election. The party represents only 24% of registered voters, so the GOP needed an enthusiastic turnout and a robust showing from conservative-leaning independents to reach the majority vote required to oust Newsom.
Its inexplicable to me, Cox said.
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