© Bettmann/CORBIS Each year before Thanksgiving, the President of the United States formally pardons a live turkey presented to him by the National Turkey Federation. It’s a tradition that’s seemingly been around forever, and while the NTF has been supplying the White House with holiday birds since the 1940s, the pardoning bit is actually a pretty new development. A lot of people point to Harry Truman as pardoning the first turkey in 1947, but the record keepers at the Truman Library can’t... READ ON

In the majority of the United States, one candidate gets all of the state’s electoral votes. That holds true whether the state has 55 electoral votes to give, like California, or a scant 3 votes to offer, like Montana. Two states, however, don’t have to go the all-or-nothing route: Nebraska and Maine. Those states have opted to use the Congressional District Method, where electoral votes are distributed according to the state’s congressional districts instead of the state as a... READ ON

Wikimedia CommonsThat’s all, folks: The 2012 election is finally over. In the run up, we tackled big election questions, from why we vote on Tuesdays to what would happen in the event of a natural disaster on Election Day to whether Americans actually move to Canada after elections. But there’s one lingering question we haven’t yet tackled: Where did the notion of Red States and Blue States come from, and how did those colors come to represent their particular political... READ ON

Wikimedia Commons"That's it, I'm moving to Canada." So goes the liberal response every time the Democratic candidate loses a presidential election. The prospect of four years of Republican rule makes America's northerly neighbor — where everyone has health care, gay marriage is legal, financial regulations are strict, and the death penalty is abolished — seem like a sanctuary of progressive values. However, conservatives in recent years have also jumped on the Canadian bandwagon, claiming... READ ON