Voting is generally seen as a very simple equation.

Yes or no. This one or that one. Separate. Count. Whoever has the most votes wins.

Easy, right? And yet very, very much not what always happens.

For some places, you might be looking for a majority of the vote — meaning more than half — rather than more than the other people who ran. For some positions, you might be looking for who got the most votes from this party plus who got the most from that one to make up a board that represents both.

And then there’s the Electoral College and the presidency. Despite all those signs in people’s yards and stickers on cars and hats and T-shirts and Facebook avatars, most of the millions of registered voters in the U.S. do not actually vote for president.

That has nothing to do with the

oft-decried low voter turnout. It’s that regardless of what the ballot says when we step into the booth or color in a bubble on our absentee slate, we aren’t really voting for president. We are being polled about who we would vote for if we had the opportunity.

There are only 538 people who actually vote for president — the electors of the constitutionally established Electoral College.

Each state gets the same number of votes in the college as it does in Congress, one for each senator and representative. When we vote for president, we are saying who we want those electors to vote for on our behalf. In effect, we are are electing our electors and deputizing them to vote for us. (The electors are actual human beings, usually politicos of some kind. It varies by state.)

Pennsylvania’s 20 votes never have been pursued more than in 2020.

A recent piece in The Atlantic looked at more than just campaigning. It addressed the idea of having electors cast ballots for the candidate who did not win the state’s popular vote — and the possibility of state governments directly appointing electors in the event of election disputes.

The article looked at swing states, including Pennsylvania, for that. Spotlight PA has taken a closer look, examining statements from Pennsylvania Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman, R-Centre, and getting response from a spokesman for House Majority Leader Kerry Benninghoff, R-Centre, both of whom say they have had no discussions with the Trump campaign on the issue. Pennsylvania GOP Chairman Lawrence Tabas was quoted in the article as saying he has mentioned it to the campaign.

“The General Assembly is obligated to follow the law, and the law is the Election Code, which clearly defines how electors are chosen and does not involve the legislature,” Corman said.

There is no greater civic duty that we have as Americans or as Pennsylvanians than voting. The equation might not be as easy as it might seem, but it still relies more than anything on the participation of the people.

Maybe we aren’t voting for the president. Maybe we are merely telling the electors how we need them to cast their votes.

But the end result should be the same, because the people will have spoken.

— The Tribune-Review, Greensburg