US Presidential Elections - Clarifications

Hi Kishore,
I have a small doubt. Hope you can resolve it.You have written that the electors are elected by the voters directly who further vote for the presidential candidate. But again you have written that once in a state, a party gets the majority of electors, the total number of electors goes to that party and further he total of this number decides who wins the presidential election."It needs 270 electoral votes to win the presidency."Since the electors' vote is already pledged, doesn't it make the election a one step process. Also, in Pub Ad, we study that American elections in reality are indirect only in theory but in practice they have become direct.Please shed some light on this matter.Thanks again for this wonderful article.
- Ruchi.

Ruchi,
There are two steps in US presidetial election.

Step 1:
Electing Presidential candidate WITHIN a party. Here electors are pledged and have to cast their vote as per their pledging in the national conference held by respective parties separately. With this all the pledging stuff is over and one presidential candidate emerges from each party. The first sentence that you have highlighted pertains to this step. I think I put this in General Election section and hence the confusion.

STEP 2:
This is the contest BETWEEN the party candidates who are already elected as presidential nominees from their respective parties in the above step. Who ever wins takes presidentship. Here people have to choose 538 electors who in turn elects the president. This way it is a indirect election. But while voting all these electors people need not know their names, i.e., who are all there in the electoral college and to whom they are voting. They just vote to either democratic candidate or republican candidate. This way it is becoming a direct election and that is what we read in pubad. Here the example that I have given holds good. In 48 of the 50 states there is a system of "Who ever wins takes all" , which means suppose a democratic candidate gets majority in a state of california which has 55 electors then all the 55 electors will be allocated to the democratic candidate. This way they count the total number of electors support attained by each candidate and whoever gets 270 (simple majority of the total electoral college) takes away presidentship.
-Kishore