Nearly 186.5 million Americans are eligible to vote in the November 5 election for the 47th President of the United States.

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

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

The US House of Representatives

Voters in 50 states will elect members of the House of Representatives. There are a total of 435 seats and each seat is up for election every two years.

The number of House members allocated to each state is determined by its population. So when a state loses or gains residents in a census, it loses or gains seats in the House of Representatives.

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

The six areas are:

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

Delegates, like the rest of the House of Representatives, are elected every two years, with the exception of Puerto Rico, whose representatives are elected every four years.

The US Senate

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

In the Senate, each state is equally represented by holding two seats each. It is not dependent on the size of its population like the House of Representatives.

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

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

The Vice President is the President of the United States Senate. His duties include chairing Senate meetings and making casting decisions. In addition to voting on legislation, the upper chamber must confirm the president's 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 held by Democrats. Only a race for a Republican-held seat is considered a mistake.

Ultimately, the party that controls Congress controls the ability to pass laws. And that could make or break a new president's agenda.

Governor's race

Voters in 11 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 United States, the president and vice president are not directly elected by voters.

When voters make their choice for these offices on their ballot, they are actually voting for a list of electors to represent their state. Once the votes are counted and certified, these electors commit to voting for a presidential and a vice presidential candidate.

These voters cast the deciding votes for president and vice president during an Electoral College meeting in December. This year the vote will take place on December 17th.

In 48 states, the presidential candidate who receives the most votes wins all voters in that state, but in Maine and Nebraska the winner-take-all method does not apply.

These two states allocate their electors using a more complicated system that reflects the popular vote at the state and congressional district levels. Therefore, their votes can be split in the electoral college.

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

For example, California receives 54 votes in the Electoral College. That equates to its two senators and 52 members of the House of Representatives.

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

Before elections, political parties in each state select their list of voters. 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 go in Clinton's favor: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

There can also be “faithless voters,” as in 2016, when seven voters cast their ballots for the other candidate rather than the one who won the state election.

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 decision rejected the idea that voters could exercise discretion over the candidate they supported. The court sided with courts in Washington and Colorado that imposed penalties on faithless electors.

What are battleground states?

Most states clearly lean either Democratic or Republican, so their election results are almost a given.

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

Election analysts consider states to be battlegrounds when opinion polls show the margin of victory in those states is less than 5 percentage points.

The seven contested states are expected to decide the outcome of the 2024 elections:

• 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 begun in 25 states. Of these, only early mail-in voting is available in Utah, Vermont and Washington.

As of Monday, more than 42.9 million Americans had already cast their votes either in person or by mail.

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

According to polls, the presidential contest is even closer in battleground states. Trump and Harris are essentially tied in Wisconsin, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Michigan. North Carolina has Trump ahead by one point. The former president is also leading in Georgia and Arizona – but the gap between Trump and Harris is within the margin of error in polls.

How high is the voter turnout?

Voter turnout in the US presidential election was around 60 percent in the last election. In 2016, 60.1 percent of eligible voters voted, up from 58.6 percent in 2012 and down from 61.6 percent in 2008.

The 2020 presidential election saw the highest voter 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 highest number of votes of any Republican candidate. In the election campaign during the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 100 million people – two thirds of all voters – voted early.