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The United States is the only democracy in the world where a presidential candidate can get the most votes and still lose the election.

The Founders debated for weeks over how to pick a president, before borrowing the Electoral College concept from Europe, where it had been used to pick the Holy Roman Emperors for hundreds of years.

(This story has a neat graph that shows the voting power of an individual in your state in the electoral college design):
theconversation.com/no-country…

The graphic reads "Voters in some states have more Electoral College influence. Wyoming has the fewest people of any state, who determine its three Electoral College votes. California has 68 times as many people - but only 18 times as many Electoral College votes." The map shows that one person in Montana, where there are 271,056 people per Electoral College vote, has 70.9% as much influence on an Electoral College vote than a person in Wyoming.

No country still uses an electoral college − except the US

Every other country that used an electoral college has been unsatisfied with the results and chosen another way to pick a leader.
The Conversation
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Wayne is easily amused
Wayne is easily amused
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It seems like we're still learning that being 3/5ths of a person for representation kinda sucks.
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Steve Lindsay
Steve Lindsay
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Notwithstanding serious issues with the Electoral College, some other democracies have systems in which the winner need not have received the most votes. Canada, for example. statista.com/statistics/106223…

Canada election 2019: preliminary results for popular vote 2019 | Statista

In the 2019 Canadian federal election, the Conservative Party received a total of nearly 6.16 million votes, compared to around 5.92 million votes for the Liberal Party.
Statista
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jerrydgj
jerrydgj
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Another horrible legacy of slavery. It should have gone when slavery was banned.
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Doug Grinbergs
Doug Grinbergs
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standard pitch: please support #NPVIC National Popular Vote Interstate Compact in your state legislature to give popular vote winner Electoral College votes, neutralize stupid EC #ElectoralCollege
#electoralcollege #npvic
This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)
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Simplicator
Simplicator
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+ if there were more than 2 candidates (like 1992 & 1996), the fraction of the vote it would take to win would be absurdly small
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Mike LaBonte
Mike LaBonte
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There is a very unlikely but valid scenario in which the presidency could be won with 23.9% of the popular vote. It requires winning by one vote in each of the 41 smallest states and getting no votes in the other states. Ok, exceedingly unlikely.
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Strange Culprits
Strange Culprits
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More proof that we need to enact the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, then we would have one person, one vote, no matter where any individual voter lives
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The Mïghty Kräcken
The Mïghty Kräcken
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That chart is terrible. The key shows five colors, but I can only see four on the map.
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