For the best answers, search on this site https://shorturl.im/avhDD
Well, right off the bat, the US elects everybody by popular vote, right down to the local dogcatcher. The confusion many people have is owing to our origins, where each individual colony of Great Britain was used to being separate from the others, and so when we formed the United States, each State had to have its concerns for Sovereignty [running its own local affairs] addressed. So a system was devised to give the small states equal representation in the congress with the large ones, while also giving the people representation based on how many there are in each state [one representative per so many thousand]. So we have 2 senators from each state in the Senate. And we have about 456 representatives in the House of Representatives. Senators and Representatives run for election based on membership in a party. The people who want to run for office [British "stand" for office] for the Republican party have their names placed on the ballot by petition signed by a sufficient number of people. Then there is an election to decide which of these Republicans will be the Republican candidate for the office in contest. The same with the other parties. This is called a primary election. When that election decides who shall be the candidate from each party, then the people vote on the various condidates for the office in contest. We do in fact have more than the 2 parties. But the system is so old and our population is so much alike and our domestic issues are so continously the same that most people really are either Republicans or Democrats. As far as the Presidential election goes, the Constitution does not provide for the direct election of the president. It provides for the States [that old States' Right thing] to send Electors equal to the number of Representatives it has in Congress to vote on the candidates put forward, without mentioning how they are to be put forward. The theory was that people would vote for Electors whose political views were known, and these Electors would gather together in a College and hash out who would be President among themselves, with the most populous states having the most votes because they have the most representatives in Congress. But rapidly, it fell out that parties would nominate a candidate and the people voted for the Electors who commmitted themselves to him, and then the Electors voted in the College for that person, even though they don't really have to. What this results in is that candidates spend a lot of time in the most populous states because those states have the most Electors, and there is the rule that the candidate who gets the most votes, even if only 51%, gets ALL the Electors from his state. There is a lot of discussion about ditching this imperfect system in favor of absolute popular election. Most people would go for it, but politicians like it because they can spout and posture in only a few states and win the election, even though they don't get the majority of the popular votes.