Nearly 186.5 million Americans are eligible to vote in the Nov. 5 election to elect the 47th president of the United States.

The presidential race isn’t the only one on the ballot. Americans will also elect people to fill various federal, state, and local positions.

In the federal races, voters will choose the president and members of the two houses that make up the U.S. Congress: the House of Representatives and the Senate.

The US House of Representatives

Voters in fifty states will elect members of the House of Representatives. There are a total of 435 seats and each seat is elected every two years.

The assigned number of House of Representatives members to each state is determined by its population, so if a state loses or gains population in a census, it can lose or gain seats in the House.

There are six non-voting members of the House of Representatives (called delegates or resident commissioners in the case of Puerto Rico) who represent the U.S. territories. They do not have the right to vote on legislation, but have floor privileges and can participate in certain other House functions.

The six territories are:

• District of Columbia
• Puerto Rico
• American Samoa
• Guam
• the Northern Mariana Islands
• the US Virgin Islands.

The delegates are elected every two years, like the rest of the House, with the exception of Puerto Rico, where the representatives are elected every four years.

The US Senate

There are also 33 Senate seats up for grabs this year, roughly a third of the 100-seat body, and one seat will be decided through a special election.

In the Senate, each state gets equal representation by having two seats each. It is not dependent on the size of the population like the House of Representatives.

In the current Senate there are 49 Republicans, 47 Democrats and four independents, who work with the Democrats:

• Bernie Sanders from Vermont
• Angus King from Maine
• Joe Manchin from West Virginia
• Kyrsten Sinema from Arizona

The vice president is the president of the United States Senate. The role includes chairing Senate sessions and casting tiebreaker votes. In addition to voting on legislation, the Senate must confirm presidential appointments of Cabinet members, Supreme Court justices, other federal judges and ambassadors.

Eight of the Senate elections are considered close races.

• Montana
• Wisconsin
• Ohio
• Nevada
• Pennsylvania
• Michigan
• Arizona
• Texas

Seven of those eight seats are currently occupied by Democrats. Only one race for a Republican seat is considered a toss-up.

Ultimately, the party that controls Congress controls the ability to pass legislation. And that could help or ruin any new president’s agenda.

Governor races

Voters in eleven states and two territories – Puerto Rico and American Samoa – will also elect governors:

• American Samoa
• Delaware
• Indiana
• Missouri
• Montana
• New Hampshire
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Puerto Rico
• Utah
• Vermont
• Washington
• West Virginia

What is the Electoral College?

In the US, the president and vice president are not directly elected by voters.

When voters make their choices for these offices on their ballots, they are actually voting for a set of electors who represent their state. After the votes are counted and certified, these electors are promised to vote for a presidential and vice-presidential candidate.

These electors cast the deciding votes for the president and vice president at an Electoral College meeting in December. This year, voting will take place on December 17.

In 48 states, the presidential candidate who receives the most votes wins all of that state’s electors, but in Maine and Nebraska the winner-takes-all method does not apply.

These two states apportion their electors based on a more complicated system that reflects the popular vote at the state and congressional district levels. Therefore, their electoral college votes can be divided.

The number of electors in each state is equal to the number of members of the House of Representatives plus two, the number of U.S. Senators from each state.

California, for example, gets 54 Electoral College votes. That corresponds to the two senators and 52 members of the House of Representatives.

There are a total of 538 electors: 535 from the 50 states and three from the District of Columbia, which is the federal capital and not a state.

Before the elections, the political parties in each state choose their electoral list. The voters are almost always party officials or supporters.

Under this system, a candidate who wins the popular vote may not actually win the White House.

A recent example was in 2016 when Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College vote to Republican Donald Trump. His victory was bolstered by victories in key swing states that polls had predicted would favor Clinton: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

There can also be “faithless electors,” as in 2016, when seven electors cast their votes for the other candidate instead of the one who won the state vote.

Five of the voters were disloyal to Clinton and two to Trump. One of the Democratic voters voted for Senator Bernie Sanders instead of Clinton.

A 2020 Supreme Court ruling rejected the idea that voters can exercise discretion over the candidate they support. The court sided with courts in Washington and Colorado that imposed penalties on faithless voters.

What are battlegrounds?

Most states lean very clearly Democratic or Republican, making their election results almost a given.

But every four years, several states offer close races between the two leading presidential candidates. These are known as battleground states, swing states or toss-up states. Candidates disproportionately focus their campaigns on these states.

Election analysts consider states as battleground states if polls show the margin of victory in those states is less than 5 percentage points.

The seven battleground states expected to determine the outcome of the 2024 elections are:

• Arizona – 11 electoral votes
• Georgia – 16 electoral votes
• Michigan – 15 electoral votes
• Nevada – six electoral votes
• North Carolina – 16 electoral votes
• Pennsylvania – 19 electoral votes
• Wisconsin – 10 electoral votes

Early voting has started in 25 states. Of those, Utah, Vermont and Washington only have early voting by mail.

As of Monday, more than 42.9 million Americans had already cast their ballots, either through in-person early voting or by mail.

According to an average of national polls compiled by the FiveThirtyEight website, Harris is ahead by 1.4 percentage points as of Sunday.

According to the polls, the battle for the presidency is even tighter in the battleground states. Trump and Harris are essentially even in Wisconsin, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Michigan. North Carolina has Trump ahead by one point. The former president also leads in Georgia and Arizona — but the gap between Trump and Harris is within the margin of error for polls.

What is the turnout in elections?

Turnout in the American presidential elections has fluctuated around 60 percent in recent elections. In 2016, 60.1 percent of eligible voters turned out, an increase from 58.6 percent in 2012, but a decrease from 61.6 percent in 2008.

The 2020 presidential election had the highest turnout in more than a century, at 66.6 percent. In a closely contested election, Joe Biden won the election with the most votes of any presidential candidate in US history, with 81,283,501 votes, and Trump received 74,223,975 votes, the most of any Republican candidate. In the race, held amid the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 100 million people – two-thirds of the total number of voters – voted early.