Why the winner of the most votes in the U.S. presidential election might lose the presidency.
A map shows the results of the Electoral College in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the results of the general election. (Illustration by News Decoder)
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The United States is a democracy. That’s what schoolchildren learn. And in the U.S. system of democracy representatives are elected by majority vote. But not necessarily.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton, the candidate for the Democratic Party, won almost three million more votes than did Donald Trump, the candidate for the Republican Party. But Trump is the one who became president. This year, there is a good possibility that the Democratic Party candidate, likely to be Kamala Harris, will get more votes than Donald Trump in the general election but Trump would still become president. And that’s because of something called the Electoral College.
According to the U.S. Constitution, the presidency is actually decided by a group of electors. These come from the 50 states and the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C.
But states don’t have equal representation in the Electoral College. Each state is awarded votes based on the number of representatives they have in the U.S. House of Representatives — one of the two bodies of the U.S. Congress — and that is based on a state’s population, plus two additional votes for the two U.S. senators each state has.
California has a population of 39 million people and 52 representatives in the House so it has 54 votes in the Electoral College. Wyoming has about 585,000 people and just one representative so it gets three votes in the Electoral College. But it gets more complicated. Delaware has twice the number of people as Wyoming and still has just one representative and the same three Electoral College votes.
That’s because the overall size of the House of Representatives is fixed by an act of Congress, passed in 1929, at 435 people divided among the states by population, which is calculated every 10 years. But that means that each House seat now represents about 700,000 people and Delaware would have to grow quite a bit to get an extra delegate. It would take another act of Congress to add more people to the House and the Electoral College.
Where votes count
It gets more complicated. In the general election for president, every U.S. citizen above the age of 18, who isn’t a convicted felon, can vote (some convicted felons can vote, but that depends on where you live). All those votes go into the pool called the general election and that’s where Hillary Clinton won by three million votes in 2016.
But all but two states award their Electoral College votes — remember, California has 54 and Wyoming has three — by a winner-takes-all system. In California, 27 million people are eligible to vote. So if everyone eligible voted and Kamala Harris were to get 14 million votes there, she would get ALL 54 electoral votes. That would basically invalidate the 13 million votes that would go to Trump.
The reverse is true in heavily-Republican Texas where there are around 17 million eligible voters. Harris could win eight million votes but none would count in the electoral college because all the 40 Electoral College delegates would go to Trump. In fact, many voters feel it is a waste of time to vote in states where it is unlikely for a candidate of a particular party to win — states heavily Republican or Democrat.
You start adding up the minority votes in each state and it adds up to millions. Here is where the Republican Party has a clear advantage in the Electoral College. There are more Republican-leaning states than Democrat-leaning ones. And those states tend to have smaller populations. In a winner-takes-all system, if Donald Trump were to get enough states with enough delegates to win the nomination, then he becomes president even though millions of more votes overall were cast for the Democratic candidate.
Remember those three million votes that Hilary Clinton won in the general election in 2016? Trump won in the Electoral College by a landslide — 304 to 227. And ultimately, THAT’S what matters.
Changes in population affect election outcomes.
It might be easier for Trump to win this year than in 2016 because solidly Democratic California has since lost an Electoral College vote because of a decline in population while Texas, which is generally Republican, gained two votes.
Now what happens if there is a tie in the Electoral College? Well, then the vote goes to the House of Representatives. But — and this is a big but — each state gets only one vote. So remember California has 54 Electoral College votes this time? That drops to the same number, one, that Wyoming has. In the event of an Electoral College tie, Wyoming’s 585,000 people have the same power as California’s 39 million people. That’s a big advantage this time around for Trump in the unlikely, but possible case of a tie.
So why did the Founding Fathers of the United States create this crazy system? It goes back to the idea of power and who holds it. They were afraid of two things: a leader who is too strong like Great Britain’s King George III at the time; and, as landowners and businesspeople, giving poor people — who congregate in cities — too much power.
The result playing out today is that low population, mostly rural states have outsized power. Wyoming has the same number of U.S. senators — two — as California, and the Senate with its 100 people for 50 states has equal power with the House of Representatives with its 435 representatives apportioned by population.
What makes all this so crazy is that in theory, it could come down to a handful of voters in just one state that tips the election even though millions more people across the United States voted for the opposing candidate.
In the United States we still call that a democracy.
Questions to consider:
- What is the Electoral College in the United States?
- Why did the “Founding Fathers” in the United States create the Electoral College?
- Do you think a country’s leadership should be decided by a pure majority of its citizens? Why do you think that?
Marcy Burstiner is the educational news director for News Decoder. She majored in political science at Union College in Schenectady, New York and is a graduate of the Columbia Journalism School. A professor emeritus of journalism and mass communication at the California Polytechnic University, Humboldt in California she is the author of the book Investigative Reporting: From premise to publication.