Question

What is the Electoral College? How does it work and what is its role in the election of the President?

Answer 1

Electoral college is a group of people appointed by each state who formally elect the president and vice president of the United States. it is a collection of the 538 votes that determine who the President of the United States will be.
538 because that's the number of senators 100 plus the number of Representatives, 435 Representative in Congress and electors from the district of Columbia.
These 538 votes in the Electoral college aren't given to the citizens directly, but are instead divided among states. Each state, no matter how populous or not, gets three votes to start. The remaining votes are given out roughly in proportion to the population of the state. The more people the state has, the more votes it gets.
When citizens go to the polls they aren't voting for president directly but they are really telling their state how they want it to use its electoral votes. 48 of the 50 states give all their electoral college votes to the candidate who wins a majority in the state. If a candidate wins a majority, no matter how small the majority, he gets all the votes. So the path of Whitehouse is clear: Win enough majorities in enough states to get more than half of the electoral college votes and you get to sit at the big desk.

If someone can win the popular vote but fail to gain 270 electoral votes. this means the winner may have won and collected their electoral votes by small margins winning just enough states with just enough electoral votes, but the losing candidate may have capture large voter margins in the remaining states. If this is a case, the very large margins secured by the losing candidate in the other states would add upto 50% of the ballots cast nationally. Therefore the losing candidate may have gained more than 50% of the ballots cast by voters but failed to gain 270 of the electoral votes.