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How will the next US president be chosen?

People vote for the next US president in the general election at a polling station in a school gymnasium in New York, November 8, 2016. (Photo by AFP)

Americans are heading to the polls to choose a new president after one of the most divisive US presidential elections in history.

About 220 million Americans are eligible to vote, but only about 140 million people are expected to cast ballots across the 50 states by the end of Election Day on Tuesday.

But just winning the popular vote will not necessarily send one of the US presidential nominees, Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, to the White House.

Instead, the complicated US election system requires a candidate to secure a majority of the 538 votes in the Electoral College — 270 or more – in order to win the presidential race.

In the past few days, both candidates have held rallies in the swing states of Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Michigan, in order to secure the electoral votes of those states.

Swing states, also called battleground states, are states in which no single nominee or political party has overwhelming support in securing that state's Electoral College votes.

The other battleground states in the 2016 election cycle are Virginia, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio, Colorado and New Hampshire.

Clinton has an advantage in the popular vote and can afford to lose in a couple of traditional battlegrounds such as Ohio and Florida.

But if she also loses in other swing states like North Carolina and Pennsylvania, then that could become fatal to her White House ambitions.

Clinton has a slim lead in the polls but a Trump win has not been ruled out. According to an average of recent polls, the Democratic nominee leads her Republican rival by about 3 percentage points.

In US presidential elections, US citizens do not directly elect the president or the vice president; instead they choose "electors", who usually pledge to vote for particular nominees.

The US Electoral College is the body that elects the American president and vice president every four years.

Voter turnout in the United States is among the lowest among developed nations, a phenomenon that has confounded politicians, activists and academics.

According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, in terms of voter turnout, the US was ranked 31st out of 35 countries that are a part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).


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