The practice of a popular vote selecting who the electors would actually be evolved over time – the idea that in a two-person race the winner would receive much less than 50% of the vote was plausible in the 1800s but not now. Mucher lower percentages imply the winning candidate would receive nearly zero votes in many states lost, and that’s not reasonable.
The reason it was plausible long ago is that many states didn’t have popular votes at all, and the distribution of the non-popular voting states might have reasonably been related to support of one candidate or the other. It didn’t actually happen, but the pontentiality was more than theoritical.
The particulars of the history of electoral college have included a wide range of unique, uncommon and “common for the time” events no longer part of modern US practices or law.
There was also the 1824 election, in which John Quincy Adams came in second place to Andrew Jackson in both the popular vote and the electoral college count. But because it was a four way race and neither man won a majority, the election went to the House of Representatives, which chose Adams for President.
It’s a strange conincidence that three of the four times the presidency has gone to someone other than the popular-vote champ, a direct descendant of a former president was involved.
In a presidiantial election, the winner is determined by the Electoral College, which is both houses of Congress, (I think). It is possible to lose the “popular vote”, and win the election in the Electoral College.
If I may add, each state has two Senators regardless of population, whereas the number of House delegates is determined by population. No state with a lower population should have more members in the House than a state with a larger population.
The Electoral College is a separate body, convened only for the purpose of electing the President and Vice President. Each state’s representation in the E.C. is determined by the total number of representatives it has in both Houses of Congress, but Congress itself is not involved (unless there’s a tie vote in the E.C.). This means that even the tiniest state has three electors in the E.C., because every state has 2 Senators and at least 1 Representative.
I’ve found myself explaining this a lot, the last two US Pres elections, as I’m sure many other Yanks Abroad here have, too…
The actual assignment methods to acheive legal requirements are complex and perplexing. Several methods have been used in US history and they can all led to surprising results: