[Tennessee Conservative]

The Electoral vote and the popular vote doesn’t add up or make sense to me.

The states award the electoral votes to the candidate that wins the popular vote of that state, right?

So, it only makes sense that the popular vote and electoral number awarded should match. The candidate that wins the 270+ electoral votes should also win the popular vote.

How can the candidate that lost end up with more popular votes overall than the candidate that won the individual states popular vote/electoral votes?

[papertyger]

The pool of popular votes per electoral vote may be smaller for the smaller states vs. the larger ones. That is, the electoral votes of California may represent more popular votes than an equivalent number of popular votes coming from a group of smaller states with equal electoral votes.

[sodpoodle]

https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-colleg
e/about.html

[Ancesthntr]

” How can the candidate that lost end up with more popular votes overall than the candidate that won the individual states popular vote/electoral votes?”

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That is easy. Here is a simple example: take every state that Trump won and give him a popular vote majority of 1 voter. He therefore still gets his 270 electoral votes. Now take the states that Hillary won and do the same thing, except in California and New York. In those two states give her 70% of the vote. Now you have a situation in which Trump wins his 270 + electoral votes, but Hillary wins the popular vote Nationwide.

Yes, that is a rather extreme and absurd exempt, but it is not terribly far from what actually happened. By the way, the founding fathers would not be terribly upset by this. The reason is because they wanted to avoid a situation in which the larger States could dominate the smaller states by virtue of their larger populations. Remember, democracy without any constraints on the majority is the worst form of tyranny imaginable. 50% + 1 could literally enslave the remaining 50% - 1, with the stroke of a pen.

[TomGuy]

How can the candidate that lost end up with more popular votes overall than the candidate that won the individual states popular vote/electoral votes?

The Electoral College was designed to help small population states have a better representation against large population states.

Without the EC, politicians would only campaign in states having the largest cities, because city population numbers tend to be greater than rural population numbers. Guess where most Libs live. That is why they want to do away with the Electoral College.