Trump lost the popular vote, which Hillary Clinton leads by almost 1 million votes as of Tuesday morning, but won the Electoral College.
California State University, Sacramento Political Science Professor Kim Nalder has been studying elections for more than a decade. However, the reason why Trump was able to take the election was because he had 290 Electoral College votes, while Clinton only had 228 Electoral College votes. His Democratic challenger, Hillary Clinton, who Boxer supported, now leads by almost 1 million votes. In fact, according to the polls, Trump won more states than his opponent which is what the authors of the US constitution wanted, that is that a majority of the states are involved in the selection of a president. The last time it happened was in 2000, when Al Gore lost to George W. Bush.
Following a presidential election in which the victor did not receive the most popular votes, Sen.
Trump later tweeted that the Electoral College is “actually genius“. But experts say Trump would have fared better if he was, you know, more popular than Clinton.
Votes in Montgomery County, Md., pushed Clinton over the 1 million vote figure, widening her lead substantially.
There are eight states that only get three electoral votes.
The President is elected by a group of appointed electors, not by the popular vote.
Under these rules, the victor of the electoral college vote does not always correspond to the candidate who won the country’s popular vote. Many other states also have ballots yet to be counted, but in much smaller numbers. Criticism of the Electoral College by both sides has become the bold new national sentiment. Senator Barbara Boxer calls the practice a “disaster for democracy“, and there is some merit to what she says. “And so they wanted to set up a structure that would insulate the election of the president from the popular vote”.
So this week, we’d like to ask you: Should the electoral college be abolished?
But there is one nagging fact that seems to be increasingly getting under Donald Trump’s thin skin: More Americans voted for Hillary Clinton by a pretty substantial margin. The exercise of our Electoral College can be a source of such confidence if we simply modify how we count everyone’s vote.
She called for “One person, one vote!”
There is certainly momentum right now to scrap the Electoral College, “but it’s unlikely to succeed”, said Derek Muller, associate professor of law at Pepperdine University.