US Elections by the numbers: 244 million voters, 7 swing states to decide Harris vs Trump fight

US Elections 2024: Swing states, electoral college votes, candidates up and down the ballot, and millions of potential voters: here is the US election, broken down by numbers.

Presidential race comes down to ‘binary choice’

Several independents ran -- and at least one, Robert F Kennedy Jr, stumbled into a number of eyebrow-raising headlines.

But in the end, the presidential race comes down to a binary choice, with the two candidates from the major parties -- Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump -- seeking to lead a polarized America.

Elections on November 5

The US Elections are scheduled for November 5. The Elections are  traditionally held on Tuesday following the first Monday in November.

7 swing states

The US Elections have seven swing states, the ones that do not favour any one party over the other.

Harris and Trump are courting voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, concentrating their campaign efforts there in an effort to ensure victory.

In a razor-tight election, just a handful of votes in any of those states could decide the outcome.

34 Senate seats and 435 spots in the House of Representatives

Voters won't just decide the White House occupant on Election Day -- they will also hit refresh on the US Congress.

Thirty-four Senate seats and all 435 spots in the House of Representatives are up for grabs.

In the House, members serve a two-year term. Republicans currently have the majority, and Harris's Democrats will be hoping for a turnaround.

In the Senate, 34 seats out of 100 are available, for a six-year term. Republicans are hoping to overturn the narrow Democratic majority.

Electoral College system of voting

The US Elections follow the Electoral College system of voting. It is an indirect system of universal suffrage that governs presidential elections in the United States.

Each state has a different number of electors -- calculated by adding the number of their elected representatives in the House, which varies according to population, to the number of senators (two per state).

Rural Vermont, for example, has just three electoral votes. Giant California, meanwhile, has 54.

There are 538 electors in total scattered across the 50 states and the District of Columbia. To take the White House, a candidate must win 270 votes.

774,000 polls workers were behind 2020 Elections

The number of poll workers who volunteered to make sure the 2020 election ran smoothly, was 774,000, said a study by the Pew Research Center.

There are three types of election staff in the United States.

Poll workers are recruited to do things like greet voters, help with languages, set up voting equipment, and verify voter IDs and registrations -- account for the majority of them.

Election officials are elected, hired or appointed to carry out more specialized duties such as training poll workers, according to Pew.

Poll watchers are usually appointed by political parties to observe the ballot count -- expected to be particularly contentious this year, thanks to Trump's refusal to agree to unconditionally accept the result.

Many election workers have already spoken to AFP about the pressure and threats they are receiving ahead of the November 5 vote.

244 million voters to cast their vote

The number of Americans who will be eligible to vote in 2024, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center, is 244 million.

How many of those will actually cast their ballot remains to be seen, of course. But the Pew Research Center says that the midterm elections of 2018 and 2022, and the presidential vote of 2020, produced three of the highest turnouts of their kind seen in the United States in decades.

"About two-thirds (66%) of the voting-eligible population turned out for the 2020 presidential election - the highest rate for any national election since 1900," Pew says on its website.

That translated to nearly 155 million voters, according to the Census Bureau.