Kathmandu. The 2020 United States Presidential elections will determine the crucial political and social avenues for the future of the nation. Throughout the debates, rallies and the recent town hall meeting, media outlets and the public have stood divided on the arguments and policies posited by the candidates.

In the 2016 Presidential elections the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton led the polls for a considerable time before the now President Donald J. Trump won the Electoral College with a total of 306 votes to 232. Now Joe Biden is leading the polls for the presidential race, however, that does not mean that he can call for an early victory over the Republican candidate.

The Electoral College is something that the highly popular Vermont Senator, Bernie Sanders has been vehemently against, and has on several occasions argued for its abolition. And there is a reason for that. US Presidents and Vice-Presidents do not enter the office by a simple vote of majority counted and declared by the American public. Sanders stated that, “It is hard to defend a system in which we have a president who lost the popular vote by 3 million votes.”

The College is basically a system whereby voters in each state cast their votes to elect the representative who will become a member of this body, and these representatives become responsible to vote in the next head of the government. It finds its roots in the compromise of 1787 whereby according to Article II of the U.S. Constitution, the body forms every four years and is the deciding factor in the final decisions.

In the exact words of the document itself, “Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or person holding an office of trust or profit under the United States, shall be appointed an elector.”

There are 538 electors, and each of the individuals get one electoral vote. For a candidate to win, she or he will have to win a majority of 270 votes. Tim Berg, an Arizonian lawyer mentioned that the system itself was confusing for the American voters as, “The general public, and even people who are well-educated and into politics or the law, kind of think when they go into the booth to vote or when they do mail-in voting, that they’re voting for Donald Trump or Joe Biden.”

The Guardian has noted that the 2016 polls severely undercounted the Trump supporters and that it remains unsure of whether the matter has been rectified properly in this instance. The states that had supported Barrack Obama in the 2012 elections, including North Carolina and Arizona, shifted to the Republican fold in 2016.

Expert.ai, an organization that uses an Artificial Intelligence (AI) backed system called the “sentiments analysis,” to forecast the election results has determined that Biden is leading the polls by a margin of 50.2% to 47.3%. However, this projects a much closer race than what a lot of other polls have projected. The company’s chief executive officer, Walter Mayo, claimed that the system helps to dig out “the issues of most importance to voters and the emotions in social media posts that may drive decision-making at the polls.”

The race is also dependent upon a few key “swing states” that may shift the majority to either of the contending sides. For this year’s elections North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida and Arizona will all be the determining states for the nominees, and will be vital for projections and considerations in the overall campaigns. The polls may showcase a picture that gives a sense of a definite victory for a particular nominee, however, the race is still widely uncertain. From the swing states to the composition of the Electoral College, there are many variables that will contribute to the results in the final Election Day in November, around two weeks away from now.