Voting for President of the United States is an indirect election. Presidential elections take place on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November in years evenly divisible by four. Federal law says that each state's electors meet in their state capitals on the Monday following the second Wednesday of December. There, they cast their electoral votes for President and Vice President. The number of electors assigned to each state is equal to the number of Senators (always two) and Representatives that the state has in Congress, but no Senator or Representative may serve as an elector. The process for selecting electors varies throughout the United States. Generally, the political parties nominate electors at their state party conventions or by a vote of the party's central committee in each State. In all but two states, the party that wins the most popular votes becomes that state's electors, essentially a winner-take-all. The two exceptions are the states of Maine and Nebraska, though neither has ever split its electoral votes. The United States is one of very few liberal democracies to use an indirect method of selecting its chief executive. The Electoral College process is somewhat controversial with strong arguments from both its supporters and detractors. Supporters note that the system has lasted for over two hundred years and protects rural communities and smaller states from the interests of urban centers and large states. Opponents, on the other hand, believe that the college is an antiquated system that silences a large minority of votes in every state and is therefore undemocratic. Supporters of the college claim that with the vote based on majority rule, it would be possible to win a strict majority of votes located in a few geographically restricted areas of the country. One could campaign and win in only the 10 largest cities in the union. This would allow a candidate to focus resources, time, and political capital in winning the greatest numbers of voters in the cities. It is felt that this pressure would apply to all parties, and lead to voters in the sparsely populated West being completely ignored. An illustrative example where the interests of a metropolitan area directly conflict with those of a state or region exists between the city of Los Angeles (pop. 3.5 million) and the state of Colorado (pop. 3.2 million) over the issue of river water use. Thus, the intent of the college is to favor a candidate whose appeal is more broadly distributed on a geographical basis across the nation. This may lead to the rare circumstance of giving the election to a candidate who did not win a majority of the popular vote.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Electoral_College (Shortened and adapted)
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