The USA has a unique system for choosing the president. Instead of voting directly for the president, we vote for a slate of electors from each state, who make the official votes for president. Each state has a number of electors equal to the number of Senators and Representatives that state has, making the distribution of electoral votes only roughly proportional to population. Currently there are 538 electoral votes allocated among the states (including 3 for Washington DC, but none for other non-state territories), meaning a candidate needs 270 electoral votes to win.
Because electoral votes are generally winner-take-all at the state level, campaigns focus on winning "swing states" while investing little effort in states that are "safe" for either side. It also means that it's possible to lose the popular vote but still win the electoral college, and hence the presidency, if you win your states by a slim margin while your opponent runs up their tally in their states. Four presidents have lost the popular vote but won the electoral college: Rutherford B. Hayes (1876), Benjamin Harrison (1888), George W. Bush (2000), and Donald Trump (2016).
TO QUALIFY FOR THIS CHALLENGE: the electoral votes of states in which you have found at least one cache must add up to 270 or more. We encourage you to use one of the many online electoral vote calculators to show us your path to victory in your log! Here's our electoral college as of the time of placing this cache (with us as the Democratic candidate because we've mostly cached in "blue" states):
A note on Maine and Nebraska: Maine and Nebraska are the only two states that do not award their electoral votes winner-takes-all. Instead, two votes go to the statewide winner, plus one to the winner of each congressional district. Because geocaching challenge cache rules don't allow congressional districts as geographical areas, this challenge treats all states as winner-takes-all.
The cache you seek is a small ammo container. You can find a path into the woods near the right field line.
