I'm not an American. But I understand most of it. It's mostly useful as an example of why ignorance is bliss.

The people here don't understand it. Basically it goes to the party best at fraud. Look up ACORN and you will learn alot.

It is just a two stage process. In theory, any number of people can stand for the presidency, but in practice you don't have a chance unless you stand for one of the tewo big parties, Republicans or Democrats. So the election day is a choice between candidates from these two parties. (There is more complexity with an "electoral college" but I will ignore that). Each candidate stands jointly with a vice-presidential candidate that they choose. But in order for the parties to dice who will be their candidate, they have elections inside the parties, called primaries. That is what was happening from the beginning of the year up to August: the two parties were, separately but simultaneously, choosing their candidate. Each choice started with five or six possibilities which were gradually narrowed down. On the Republican side John McCain emerged as the most popular quite early. In the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were neck-and-neck until close to the end. So Clinton lost to Obama in the race to become the Democratic candidate for the main election to be held on 4th Nov. She is now campaigning for him to become President.

It would take a lot longer then here to explain it. Each person votes per State. Each state has a voting representative from each party known as an elector or a delegate. The majority vote from the people decides which party electors vote goes to which candidate. Each elector comes with a point total. So if Ohio is worth 220 electoral votes and the majority of the people vote for Obama, the total delegates for the democrat party from Ohio will place their vote for Obama during the electoral college meeting. As for Hillary. Each party has a primary which decides which candidate will best represent the party views in the Presidential election. The primary is a vote within the party that you are registered with. Hillary was not chosen as the democrat candidate. She is now working to get Obama elected as President. That's about it in a nut shell. I know that I've skipped a lot but time don't allow the complete explanation.

You don't want to know....really

Lucky you! And it sounds like you know as much as the average American does