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.
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