Sugar cane plantations in the colonies of the West Indies. The older Sugar and Molasses tax charged the customer a duty of 6 pence per gallon of molasses. The bribe to customs officials per gallon of smuggled molasses was 1.5p. The new Sugar Act lowered the duty to 3p per gallon. The British wrongly assumed that Americans would be willing to accept the newly reduced tax. The smuggling continued until 1766 when the tax was lowered to one pence, making it cheaper to legally pay the tax than to smuggle.
The President and Vice President of the United States are elected by the Electoral College, which consists of 538 presidential electors from the fifty states and Washington, D.C. . Presidential electors are selected on a state-by-state basis, as determined by the laws of each state.
The candidate who wins the popular vote in a state wins all the pledged votes of the state's electors. The Electoral College system was established in Article II of the Constitution and amended by the 12th Amendment in 1804. Each state gets a number of electors equal to its number of members in the U.S. House of Representatives plus one for each of its two U.S. Senators. The District of Columbia gets three electors.