THE UNITED STATE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume 19, Issue 1468, 30 October 1872, Page 2

THE UNITED STATE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION.

The following account of the manner-; iu which the President is elected may be of interest at the present time. It is supplied by the American correspondent of the London Times. 1 —

The presidential election of 1872 in the United States will be held on Tuesday, November 5, that being the Tuesday after the first Monday in the month, which is the day fixed by Jaw. Upon that day, in every State of theUnion, excepting Florida, the malesoxer twenty-one years of age, who are qualified to vote for members of the most numerous "branch of the State Legislature, will cast their ballots for " electors," who subsequently meet at their respective State capitals and cast their ballots for President and VicePresident; these ballots are transmitted to Washington, and on a fixed day in February, 1873, are openel and counted in the presence of Congress, and the person having the highest number of electoral votes for President, provided it is a majority of the wholenumber cast, is declared elected President, and the person having a majority for Vice-President is declared elected Vice-President. The persons so chosen enter upon the duties of their offices on the 4th March, 1873. If no one has a majority, then from the three highest on the list for each office the House of Representatives, voting by States—each State having one vote—proceeds to choose 1 a President and a Vice-President. This is a contingency, however, so improbable in the present election that no attention is paid to it. The theory of the electoral system is that the people not being sufficiently intelligent to choose their highest r.iler.<, select their leading men to do it for them; but this theory was long ago disregarded. In practice the party conventions select candidates, and the electors nominated by each party are in advance pledged to support their party's candidates, being a set of " dummies '* merely, who cast their ballots as pre\iously instructed by the party convention. Each State is entitled in the presidential election to a number of electoral votes equal to the whole numbei ot its senators and representatives in Congress. Thus Pennsylvania being entitled to two senators and 27 representatives in the 43rd Congress, which begins on the 4th of March next, will have 29 electoral votes in the choice of a President. There are 37 States in the Union, and the whole number of electors to which they are entitled, or, as it is called, the "Electoral College," is 366; so that a candidate, to be successful, must receive 184 votes. NoState has less than three electoral votes.. The College for 1872 is considerably larger than the College which was chosen at the last presidential election, in 1868, and elected General Grant President, the change being caused by an increase in the House, of Representatives consequent upon the new appointment of representatives resulting from the census of 1870. Theie were 317 electors in 1868, and there are 366 now —an increase of 49.