Your election questions, answered

Analysis by Zachary B. Wolf, CNN

(CNN) — The November 5 general election approaches, and Americans have some questions.

When CNN asked what was confusing about the system or what to expect in the weeks to come, submissions rolled in.

While many of the questions seemed more like vituperative venting about the presidential candidates, others were constructive and interesting. They ranged from questions about the Electoral College to specific inquiries about why ballots in some counties look the way they do.

I’ve taken the liberty of editing some of these questions for both style and length. I just included first names and state of residence based on the submissions. If we didn’t get to your question in this go-round, stay tuned or ask something new. We’ll add answers to new questions weekly until the election and also send them out to the What Matters newsletter audience. More recent questions are listed first.

Polls are good for some things and not so good for others. They’re bad at showing precisely who will vote and how, but they’re good at showing us what is motivating voters. They can also be useful in showing us the direction a race is heading if there is a definitive trend in one direction.

This particular presidential race is incredibly tight, according to the polls. CNN’s polling editor Ariel Edwards-Levy has a helpful guide on how to use polling information. Read her story: What the polls have told us about the 2024 election.

Probably not. The rules are different in each state. When CNN reached out to all 50 states about this very question in 2020, all but five responded, and of those, it was only possible to change an already cast mail-in vote in six states. In battleground Michigan, one of the few states where changing a mail-in vote is possible, the deadline for changing, or “spoiling,” a ballot has already passed.

Only the 50 states and Washington, DC, get electoral votes. It took the 23rd Amendment, enacted in 1961, to get electoral votes for Washington, DC. People from US territories are US citizens, and they can vote in the presidential election only if they are living in one of the states or Washington, DC.

Granting statehood to US territories is not a major, current topic of discussion in the US, even though Puerto Rico, with more than 3 million residents, is larger than several US states. Puerto Rican voters did vote in favor of a nonbinding referendum in 2020 and are considering the issue in another referendum on Election Day this year. Becoming a state requires legislation in the US Congress.

This question is in reference to Donald Trump floating the idea of ending the federal income tax and replacing it with revenue from tariffs, as well as his pledge to stop taxing Social Security benefits if he wins the White House. But presidents don’t have absolute power.

The income tax was established by the 16th Amendment to the Constitution, and Congress has the power to levy taxes. Changing the tax code would require legislation passed through Congress.

There have been faithless electors in US history. In 2016, for instance, there were seven rogue votes from both red and blue states for Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, among others.

In 2020, the US Supreme Court ruled that states can punish faithless electors. Most states have laws that require electors to support the winner in their state, according to the Library of Congress.

The system has multiple stopgaps and, despite what Trump and Elon Musk say, there are a lot of people on both sides of the political aisle who work very hard to ensure US elections are fair and accurate.

Poll watchers – both Republicans and Democrats – will be present in polling places on Election Day observing what’s going on. Many Americans’ votes are counted by machine, but they fill out a paper ballot, which can be accessed in case of a recount.

Election machines should not be connected to the internet, according to election officials. There are audits of election machines to make sure they work. The courts are available to hear challenges in the event that one side or the other suspects a problem. They can hear evidence and take testimony under oath.

When you cast a ballot, you’re also expressing your faith in the system that it will be counted. But the process is meant to be transparent and accountable.

You can usually verify that you did vote. When you vote, that’s usually recorded by your city or state, and you can frequently check your state government website to see in which elections you’ve participated.

If you’re voting by mail, you can usually track the progress of your ballot online, like your online food order or your package in the mail.

If you’re voting in person, the vast majority of Americans will use paper ballots, which are processed by voting machines and kept for audits or recounts.

And note: If you’re nervous about the process, it might be a good time to volunteer to work at an election site and see how the process works.

There were a lot of questions along these lines. We do cover negative news about Vice President Kamala Harris.

What I’d say is that if you’ve seen the top attack ad against Harris from Trump and his allies over her past support of certain rights for transgender people, it is based on CNN reporting. CNN’s KFile has also uncovered Harris’ earlier positions on oil companies and immigration.

And as Democrats have begun to grow nervous about her campaign, we have covered those developments.

Presidents get too much credit for good economies and too much blame for bad economies. In this weird election, the economists say the economy is good, but voters say it’s not great.

In a capitalist economy like the US, the president does not directly control prices, although there are levers they can pull. Presidents can impose tariffs without help from Congress. This is Trump’s plan, although experts warn it will raise prices, not lower them.

Harris has promised to go after corporations for price gouging, but it’s not clear if that will lead to the dropping of prices in a broad way – and the plan could backfire, according to some economists. Short answer: It’s hard for presidents to drive down prices.

Everyone should be paying attention to Ron’s question. Neither party or candidate is actively talking about this, even though the government has warned that Social Security will not be able to pay full benefits as soon as 2035. The political parties will soon have to take this seriously.

Right now, both sides are simply promising to protect Social Security benefits. It could require raising the retirement age or raising taxes, two things that voters don’t seem to want to hear much about.

Note: The long list of tax breaks Trump has promised, including pledging to stop taxing Social Security benefits, could worsen the program’s finances and lead to cuts to those benefits in six years, according to a recent analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan government watchdog. It did not do a detailed analysis of the impact of Harris’ platform on Social Security, CNN’s Tami Luhby reports, because it said the changes would be minimal.

There actually is just such a protection in the 14th Amendment, which prohibits anyone who took part in an insurrection from serving in Congress or being an “officer of the United States.” Multiple states pursued removing Trump from their primary ballots based on this clause.

But in March, the US Supreme Court unanimously rejected Colorado’s effort to disqualify Trump from its ballot. A slimmer majority of five conservative justices ruled that for a person to be removed from a ballot for being an insurrectionist, Congress must first pass legislation.

The current Republican majority in the House is not going to pass legislation declaring Trump an insurrectionist. And if he is reelected, Trump has promised to fire the special counsel currently prosecuting him for election interference.

It could take a while, depending on the number of mail-in ballots cast in some states and how close things are.

CNN did not project that President Joe Biden would win the 2020 election until four days after Election Day. If the election is close in one or more decisive states, it could be longer. In 2000, for instance, the disputed results in Florida carried on for 36 days until the Supreme Court ended a recount.

In 2016, on the other hand, things were relatively close in some key states and Hillary Clinton conceded the day after Election Day. Trump is unlikely to ever concede. Harris has talked about the importance of a peaceful transfer of power.

The 2000 example, in which Republican and ultimate winner George W. Bush was ahead after the initial count, brings up a good point. We can expect that if Trump loses he will contest the results since he has alleged voter fraud in every election in which he was a candidate. However, we should also expect that in the event of a close result in which Harris trails, Democrats will also explore legal avenues.

Rules on how and when a recount is triggered or can be requested vary from state to state. This year, according to a new law, states have until December 11 to ascertain a winner in order to guarantee their electoral votes are counted.

When I asked CNN’s director of election analytics Jennifer Agiesta about all of this, she noted that some states have taken measures since 2020 that will make their counting a bit faster. Her response is below:

Two of the states we projected last in 2020 are good examples: In Georgia, after changes to laws around preelection voting, a lot more people who vote before Election Day do so early in person rather than by mail, which means there are fewer mail ballots to count, which should speed things up.

In North Carolina, they no longer accept by-mail ballots after Election Day, so there is more known about what’s left to count there. And we expect a lot fewer people to vote by mail generally, since we’re not in the middle of a pandemic, so that also ought to speed things up.

The time it takes to process the by-mail ballots is the thing that slows it all down. Pennsylvania, of course, hasn’t made it easier for election officials to get those ballots ready to count before Election Day, so the count will likely keep going there for a while.

It is not possible for noncitizens to vote in this election. Congress outlawed noncitizen voting in 1996.

If a noncitizen voted, the person would be breaking the law and probably would be deported. While Trump has alleged for years that there is an epidemic of noncitizen voting, there is zero evidence to back that up.

Every state except North Dakota requires voter registration. Each vote is paired with a registration. States routinely scrub their voter rolls. There are some few instances of people who are noncitizens becoming registered to vote, but it’s usually an error. When states identify noncitizens accidentally on their rolls, they are removed.

The conservative Heritage Foundation tracks prosecutions for noncitizen voting. There have been 25 in the past 20 years. Critics argue that Trump’s insistence there is noncitizen voting is a scare tactic.

While there are very few cities in California, Maryland and Vermont and in Washington, DC, that allow noncitizens to vote in local elections, those are the exceptions to the rule. No noncitizen can vote for president.

RELATED: What the data actually shows about noncitizens voting in US elections.

In order to answer Sheila’s question, I called Nicole Unzicker, director of the Board of Elections in Butler County, where Sheila lives.

It turns out that a paper version of the ballot used for mail-in voting shows all of the candidates in one line. However, for in-person voting on the Dominion system used there, the text for the first ballot question is large and long. That means in-person voters must scroll to see all of the presidential candidates when they get to the president question.

Unzicker said the order of candidates is always alphabetical, but the first listed candidate is rotated between the county’s roughly 300 precincts. So both Harris and Trump should be on the bottom half of the scroll for an equal number of voters.

With long and large wording for ballot initiatives, the scroll is a known issue, according to Unzicker. She said her office created a video that plays for voters in line and also has instructions at each voting station.

It’s important to remember that ballots are different within states and even counties depending on which offices are up for election. For information on your state, check out CNN’s Voter Handbook.

There were a lot of questions about the Electoral College, which should frustrate people on both sides of the aisle. There will be more Trump voters in California than in Texas and more Harris voters in Texas than in New York.

You’d need to change the US Constitution to eliminate the Electoral College. And that’s not impossible. The 12th Amendment changed the process early in US history.

But enacting a constitutional amendment is a long, arduous, two-step process.

First, an amendment can be proposed by a two-thirds majority vote in both the House and the Senate, or two-thirds of states can propose an amendment by requesting a constitutional convention.

Second, once an amendment is proposed, it must be ratified by either three-quarters of the state legislatures or conventions called in each state.

It’s a difficult enough process that the most recent amendment, the 27th, was ratified 32 years ago. It focused on congressional compensation. The 26th Amendment, which made 18 the official voting age, was ratified more than a half-century ago, in 1971.

There have been multiple attempts to eliminate the Electoral College in US history, most recently in 1969, when a bill passed the US House with overwhelming support but was filibustered in the Senate.

States have also changed the system by moving to pick their electors as proxies for the popular vote in states rather than as a group of electors who can vote however they wish.

There is an effort to simply ignore the Electoral College and honor the popular vote winner. Multiple states have agreed to a National Popular Vote compact, whereby they would award their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner. The agreement only kicks in when states representing a majority of electoral votes sign on. They’re still about 61 electoral votes short.

I’m certainly not going to be the person who defends the Electoral College here. But I will point out your vote only seems irrelevant because there is a strong majority in your state. States change.

Remember when Florida was THE swing state? It wasn’t that long ago.

Remember when Ohio was a major swing state? Both are now essentially red.

Democrats have been salivating over Texas and North Carolina for years, trying to turn them blue. While two of the past six elections ended with a Republican getting fewer votes but winning the White House, there is some serious conjecture that this year could see Trump win the popular vote and lose the Electoral College.

That would be a plot twist to drive his conspiracy theories.

None of this is to endorse the Electoral College or justify using something from the era of slavery in today’s America. But it is also true that politics is always changing.

Let’s not use the term “uneducated,” which is pejorative. Harvey’s use of all caps is evidence that term is loaded.

There is a definite divide in this country between voters on the basis of what level of education they attained. Those with college degrees may be more likely to support Harris. Those without college degrees may be more likely to support Trump.

I wrote recently about the Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik’s argument that education level is the best predictor of how a person will vote. We will have to see if that plays out on Election Day.

A recent report by the Lumina Foundation found that about 14% of Americans have a graduate or professional degree and about 23% stopped after earning a bachelor’s degree. About 9% have an associate degree, and about 8% have a post-high school certification of some kind.

This is more of a comment than a question, but it’s worth exploring. Presidents are limited to two terms, so why not members of Congress? Because of the Supreme Court.

The court ruled in 1995 that imposing term limits on members of Congress would require a constitutional amendment. The decision barred states from imposing their own term limits on their members of Congress.

There is talk of lawmakers passing a law to reform the Supreme Court and impose term limits on justices, but that is in its early stages and currently lacks overwhelming support.

When Congress tried with a Republican majority in the mid-’90s to propose a term limits amendment for members of Congress, it failed repeatedly.

There are a few ways to look at this, either in the popular vote or the Electoral College.

In the Electoral College, the closest election was relatively recent, in 2000. Bush got 271 electoral votes, one more than he needed to win the White House. Al Gore got a little more than 500,000 more total votes. The tightest possible margin in Florida, 537 votes, essentially decided the election. But there was also a narrow Bush win in New Hampshire too. Every state counts!

The election of 1876 between eventual-winner Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden was decided by a single electoral vote, but only after the electoral votes of three states were disputed. A special commission ultimately awarded them to Hayes even though Tilden got more popular votes.

There are closer popular vote margins. These include 1960, when John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon by about 119,000 ballots in the popular vote, and 1880, when James Garfield defeated Gen. Winfield Hancock despite getting fewer than 2,000 more popular votes. But neither of those was close in the Electoral College.

I’m not including the election of 1800, even though it resulted in a tie in the Electoral College. For starters, many state legislatures picked electors in early American elections, so it’s hard to say who got more popular votes. Second, the tie was between two running mates. They simply did not coordinate in the Electoral College.

Not only do Republicans not currently hold the presidency, but Congress actually passed a law in 2022 making clear that the vice president’s role in counting electoral votes is only ceremonial. They also changed the bar by which lawmakers can challenge a state’s electoral votes.

That said, CNN has reported that much of what special counsel Jack Smith accused Trump and his campaign of engineering after his 2020 loss is still in play for 2024. These include unfounded allegations of large numbers of undocumented immigrants casting ballots, something for which there is no evidence. They are also filing many preelection lawsuits, setting the groundwork to file lawsuits challenging the results if they don’t go Trump’s way. Read more about GOP challenges to mail-in voting.

Trump supporters have a different view, but this is a good question about strategy. While the general mood about the economy has improved, it’s still quite dim. More than half the country, 52%, said in a recent Gallup poll that they feel worse off than they did four years ago.

It might be bad politics for a candidate to tell people who are having trouble affording things that they’re wrong about the way they feel. If you listen to Harris, she does say a lot of the things you suggest above, that inflation is coming down, but she also clearly wants to appeal to the Americans who are having trouble affording groceries, who can’t afford to buy a house and who feel like there’s a lot more work to be done.

This story has been updated with additional information.

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