The Electoral College doesn't reflect the popular vote in US presidential elections. Four time, presidential candidates have won the national popular vote but been denied the presidency.
Explanation:
What is the Electoral College?
The Electoral College isn’t actually a place. It’s a process that was created in 1787 as a compromise between the election of a president by members of Congress and the election of a president by qualified citizens, and according to the Brennan Center for Justice in part because the Founding Fathers were uncomfortable with giving power to the people.
The Electoral College was engineered to empower the white south in times of slavery. Today, it is still seen as a flawed system; contrary to the ‘one person, one vote’ principle of democracy.
How does the popular or electoral vote affect elections?
In the 2016 election Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, nearly 3 million more votes nationally than Donald Trump, but because Trump secured 77 more electors than Clinton, in part due to narrow Trump victories in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (in total 77,744 votes), he still won the presidency.
The reason this was possible is that the number of Electoral College members match the number of state’s members of congress, and these aren't representative. The number of congressmen assigned to each state in the House of Representatives hasn’t changed for over a century, so that today there are is one voting member for every 747,000 Americans; more than triple the original ratio.
However, this elector-to-voter ratio is an average. The real flaw in the system is that it varies wildly from state-to-state. Meaning that individual voters in some states hold a huge amount more real power than others. Voters in Wyoming have nearly four times as much influence as Californians do, for instance.
An example; Montana’s 1,050,493 people have just one House member but Rhode Island, a state with only 9,000 more residents is tipped into the bracket of having two House representatives, which is one for every 529,820 citizen. Suddenly every resident in Rhode Island has almost double the power compared to someone living in Montana.
In the most extreme case, npr reported that it would be possible to win a presidential election with just 23 per cent of the popular vote.
Voters living in states where the majority don’t agree with them end up feeling leads to voter disillusioned and sometimes even abstain from voting.
