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Five times in American history the candidate with the most votes did not become president. Nobody cheated in any of the five. Here is the machine that produced them.
That is how almost every election you have ever heard of works. A mayor, a governor, a class president: count the ballots, most votes wins, done.
The presidency does not work that way, and it never has.
Five times — in 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016 — the person who got the most votes nationwide did not end up in the office. Every one of those five is a normal result of the rules as written. To see why, you have to stop thinking about one election and start thinking about fifty-one of them.
Read your ballot carefully in a presidential year and it will list the candidates' names. What you are actually choosing is a slate of electors — a group of people pledged to that candidate, who will meet in December and cast the votes that legally decide the election.
This is not a technicality that got added later. It is in Article II of the original Constitution, and the wording is unusually loose: each state appoints its electors in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct. The Constitution does not say the people have to vote at all.
In the election of 1824, six of the twenty-four states did not hold a presidential popular vote. Their legislatures simply picked the electors. That was entirely legal, and it stayed legal — every state chose to hold a popular vote eventually because it wanted to, not because the Constitution made it.
There is no national presidential election. There are fifty state elections plus the District of Columbia, each producing electors, and the electors are what gets counted.
Every state gets one elector for each of its members of Congress. That is its House seats plus its two senators.
So the total is:
That makes 538, and a majority of 538 is 270.
Notice the two senators. Every state gets those, from the largest to the smallest, which means the smallest states get more electors than their population alone would earn them. That is not an accident or a rounding error — the Senate was built that way on purpose in 1787, and the Electoral College inherited it.
Then there is a second rule that the Constitution says nothing about at all. Forty-eight states and DC hand every one of their electors to whoever wins that state, by one vote or by a million. Winner-take-all is a choice each state made for itself, and two states chose otherwise: Maine has split its electors by congressional district since 1972, and Nebraska since 1992.
Take each state's population from the 2020 census and divide it by that state's number of electors. That gives you how many residents one elector stands for. Read the five bars and notice how far apart the ends are.
| State | 2020 census population divided by electoral votes |
|---|---|
| Wyoming | 192000 |
| Vermont | 214000 |
| Alaska | 244000 |
| Texas | 729000 |
| California | 732000 |
One Wyoming elector stands for about 192,000 residents. One California elector stands for about 732,000.
That is close to four times as many people behind each California elector. Both numbers are simply what falls out of the rule: three electors is the floor, because every state has at least one House seat and exactly two senators, and Wyoming has the fewest people of any state.
Hold onto that ratio. It is the single fact both sides of the argument later in this episode are arguing about — and, importantly, they do not disagree about the number. They disagree about whether it is a feature.
Wyoming has far fewer people than California, but each of its electors stands for far fewer residents. What causes that?
Here they are in order, with the real numbers. Read the middle column for what happened and the right column for the result. No adjectives — every one of these is a recorded tally.
In 1888, 2000 and 2016 the same mechanism produced the split. What was it?
This is one of the longest-running disagreements in American politics, and it is a real one — thoughtful people land on both sides, and always have. Here is each case made as well as it can honestly be made.
The case for keeping it. The United States is a federation of states, not one undivided population, and the presidency is deliberately chosen by those states rather than by a single national headcount — the same reason the Senate gives Wyoming and California two seats each. Requiring a candidate to assemble a majority across many different states, rather than run up a total wherever people are densest, pushes campaigns to build broad coalitions across regions instead of concentrating on a handful of large metropolitan areas. And a close result stays local: in 2000 the recount fight was confined to one state. Under a single national count, a national result that close could mean recounting every ballot box in the country.
The case for changing it. A resident of Wyoming carries close to four times the weight in choosing a president that a resident of California does, and no principle of one-person-one-vote survives that. Winner-take-all means a vote in a state that is not close changes almost nothing, so campaigns visit and advertise in a small set of contested states and largely skip the rest — which includes most of the country, large and small states alike. And five times the office has gone to the candidate fewer people chose, which is a hard result to explain to anyone who was told their vote decides it.
Both of those are arguments made in good faith by people who have studied it closely. Neither is a cover story for the other. This course is not going to hand you a verdict on which is right — that is genuinely yours to work out, and you should expect to keep meeting the argument for the rest of your life.
Changing it would take a constitutional amendment: two-thirds of both chambers of Congress and then three-quarters of the states. That is the same bar the 19th Amendment cleared, and it is why the argument has stayed an argument for two centuries.
Someone tells you that the reason candidates campaign in only a handful of states is written into the Constitution. What is the accurate response?
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Article II, Section 1: each state appoints electors 'in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct', in a number equal to its whole number of Senators and Representatives (Constitution Annotated, congress.gov). Electoral vote allocation for the 2024 and 2028 elections, based on the 2020 census: 538 total electors, 270 needed to elect; California 54, Texas 40, Wyoming 3, Vermont 3, Alaska 3 (National Archives, 'Distribution of Electoral Votes'). 23rd Amendment, ratified 1961, gives the District of Columbia electors — no more than the least populous state, which in practice is three (National Archives). 12th Amendment, ratified 1804, requires electors to cast separate ballots for president and vice president and sends an election with no electoral majority to the House of Representatives, where each state delegation casts one vote (Constitution Annotated). 2020 census resident populations: Wyoming 576,851; Vermont 643,077; Alaska 733,391; Texas 29,145,505; California 39,538,223 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census apportionment tables). Dividing by each state's electoral votes gives roughly 192,000; 214,000; 244,000; 729,000; and 732,000 residents per elector. Maine has allocated electors by congressional district since the 1972 election and Nebraska since 1992; the other 48 states and DC use winner-take-all, a choice made by each state rather than required by the Constitution (FairVote; 270toWin). 1824: electors were chosen by popular vote in 18 states and by the legislature in 6. Jackson 152,901 popular votes and 99 electors; Adams 114,023 and 84. A majority of the 261 electors was 131, so under the 12th Amendment the House decided, electing Adams on February 9, 1825 (National Archives, 'Tally of the 1824 Electoral College Vote'). 1876: Tilden 4,288,546 popular votes, Hayes 4,034,142. Twenty disputed electoral votes were referred to an Electoral Commission created by Congress, which awarded them all to Hayes; the final count was Hayes 185, Tilden 184 (270toWin; Britannica). 1888: Cleveland 5,534,488 popular votes, Harrison 5,443,633; Harrison won the electoral vote 233 to 168 (Britannica; Wikipedia, 'List of United States presidential elections in which the winner lost the popular vote'). 2000: Gore 50,999,897 popular votes, Bush 50,456,002; Bush won the electoral vote 271 to 266 (Britannica; National Archives). 2016: Clinton received 2,868,686 more popular votes than Trump, who won the electoral vote 304 to 227 (Federal Election Commission official results; National Archives). Amending the Constitution requires two-thirds of both chambers of Congress and ratification by three-quarters of the states (Article V).