What is the electoral vote vs the popular vote? (US)
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In the US, votes for the president are not all weighted equal. Instead, each state gets a number of *Electoral College* votes. Those votes are equal to its number of representatives in Congress, which means means some amount proportionally divided by population, and then 2 for the senators.
What this means is that a Wyoming, with ~578,000 people, has 3 Electoral College votes, or one vote per ~192,666 people. California, with a population of ~39.51M people, has 55 votes, or one vote per ~71,840 people.
Additionally, most states have a winner-take-all race. If you get 50%+1 votes in a single state, you get ALL the votes for that state. If you win California by 1 hundred or 1 million votes, you still get all 55 of their state votes.
This creates a problem where someone could theoretically win the whole race with less than 24% of the popular vote. If you get 50%+1 of the vote in all the smallest states, you get an electoral college victory by the time you have 24% of the popular vote.
The president is elected by the people who vote for one or another candidate. But what they are really electing are delegates to the “electoral college” who then vote to actually elect the president. It can and has happened that a candidate may win the electoral vote but lose the popular vote, as each state has a certain number of electors (one per congressional representative plus one per senator) and the electors are pledged to vote as the state popular votes indicate. You will hear this described as “winning the state” This was all designed way back when it might take weeks for the electors to travel to Washington DC to cast their vote.
When the United States was founded, the founding fathers wanted to find a way to equalize the power between states with large population and small populations. Thus they created the Electoral College for deciding the president. Each state gets a number of electors based on their total number of senator and representatives (so a minimum of 3, but more based on population.) After the popular vote, the electors would then report to the capital and vote to reflect their state’s popular vote. This system made it possible to keep the voting process quick and easy in a time before technology and the internet since instead of counting hundreds of thousands of ballots to determine the president, the federal government only had to count a number of votes equal to the Senate and House seats, which it could handle since the House and Senate are branches of the federal government; each state was given the authority to find a way to count their own votes. It also still gave the people a voice in their elections as the electors voted based on the state’s popular vote. In modern times, the system is still in place, but works differently than it originally did; the biggest difference being unfaithful electors which is an on going issue. Some groups are trying to either remove the electoral college all together, or force it to directly reflect the popular vote. We’ll see how it all plays out over time.
The citizens don’t really select the president. All the states pick the president in their own little mini-election after the big one. This states-only election is the electoral college and is the election that actually selects who gets to be president.
States have a number of votes at the electoral college (same as the number of congresspeople + senators for that state) and each state’s votes go 100% towards whoever the citizens selected within that state (with a small number of exceptions… each state can have its own rules, but most follow this rule). This is why people say certain states are more important than others, depending on the number of votes the state has as well as how many people are in the state relative to the number of votes.
The “popular vote” is just who got the most votes by citizens all across the country during the big election. Legally it means nothing, but realistically it’s a better indicator of who the people want to be president even though the rules may select another.
It’s best to think of electoral votes as “points” that you get for winning a state. To win the election you don’t need the highest number of votes, you need the most “points”. So, imagine a world where not many people show up to vote in a state that is worth a lot of points. Like 500 people show up to vote for candidate #1, he wins the points and that’s it. Then, in a smaller state worth less points, a LOT of people show up to vote for candidate #2. Like 45,000 people. Candidate #2 wins that state and gets the points.
But, that state wasn’t worth as many points because not as many people live in the state, even though more people voted in that state than in the larger state. So, even though candidate #2 got more physical votes, he didn’t win as many points, and so candidate #1 wins the election.
Say you have only three States with 10 people in each. Party A wins 6 seats in 2 states and 0 in the third. They have won 2 states out of 3 and have won the electoral vote. Yay! However, Party B won 4 votes in the 1st two States and 10 in the third. They got 18 votes but party A only got 12 in total – They won the popular vote. Yahoo!
The US and the UK use the electoral vote where party A wins. It helps small states have a say so populous states (or places like London) don’t have too much influence on the nation.
Hillary Clinton won the competition the US was not having (i.e. the popular vote).
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