Just as Australia and the United States may be considered nations divided by a common language, their voting systems are also quite different.
Voting is not compulsory in the United States, which uses an electoral college system that determines who is elected President on a state-by-state basis.
About half to two-thirds of the eligible population of 250 million Americans eligible to vote typically turn out to cast their ballot.
In Australia, where voting is mandatory for the 18 million people enrolled, a preferential system is used across the nation.
The U.S. President is elected via a system whereby whoever wins each of the 50 states based on the popular vote collects all of the electoral college votes for that state, with the number of electoral votes broadly equating to the size of its population.
In Australia, voters rank candidates for the House of Representatives, in order of preference, such that if nobody wins a majority of first-preference votes, preferences are redistributed until one candidate has more than 50% of the vote.
California (population 39.5 million) has the most electoral college votes in the United States with 54, while seven states (Delaware, North and South Dakota, Alaska, Vermont, Wyoming and Washington D.C.) have the minimum of three each.
Vice-President Kamala Harris, the Democrat candidate, and former President Donald Trump, her Republican rival, need a majority of the 538 votes (270 or more) in America to win the contest.
A candidate who wins a state by a landslide or with 50.1% of the vote would pick up all of electoral votes, which means Trump or Harris could win most of the popular vote across the country, but lose the election.
This happened in 2016, when Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton despite getting almost three million fewer votes and George W. Bush defeated Al Gore.
According to opinion polls, the race is too close to call.
As we have reported, in the lead-up to the election on 5 November Trump and Harris held rallies in some of the battleground states that could determine the outcome: Pennsylvania (19 votes), North Carolina (16), and Michigan (15).
Other swing states that could tip the balance either way include Georgia (16 votes), Arizona (11), Wisconsin (10) and Nevada (6).
The word "college" refers to the group of people, known as electors, who are responsible for formally casting the votes for each state.
Following the 2022 Federal election in Australia, the ruling Labor Party holds 77 of the 151 seats in the lower house, with the Liberal/National Party coalition holding 74 seats and the balance shared among other parties and independents.