Hillary Clinton got nearly three million more votes than Donald Trump in 2016. Why didn’t she become President of the United States?
Four years later, Trump’s backers tried to alter the vote counting process in several states when they sought to invalidate Joe Biden’s victory in 2020.
And in 2024, if the election is as close as the polls say it is, the popular vote winner may not be elected President.
When we think of democracy, we assume that whoever gets the most votes will win an election. But it doesn’t work exactly that way.
In the United States, the real winner is determined by an 18th century contraption called the Electoral College. There’s no one better at understanding and explaining the elector system than Robert Alexander, who literally wrote the book on it. I was delighted to welcome Rob to the second episode of our “Now It’s History” podcast.
Robert Alexander is a professor of political science and the Founding Director of the Bowling Green State University Democracy and Public Policy Research Network. He is the author of the definitive study, Representation and the Electoral College, published in 2019 by Oxford University Press. His research on electors was cited during arguments before the Supreme Court in 2020, and he has appeared as an expert on the Electoral College throughout the media.
If we’re lucky, the popular vote margin of this year’s election will be big enough that we won’t have a “misfire” election like 2016, when Donald Trump’s strength in the Electoral College made Hillary Clinton’s popular vote edge essentially irrelevant.
Or like 2000, when Al Gore beat George W. Bush by half a million popular votes only to lose in the Electoral College, with an assist by the US Supreme Court that put an end to a recount in Florida.
But the incredibly close polls this year may well mean we’re headed back to Electoral College hell for the third time this century. We could even see a tie vote in the Electoral College, which would cause all kinds of mischief.
In our conversation, Rob talks about how the electors are chosen, how they cast their votes, the problem of “faithless electors,” the many proposals to reform the Electoral College — and the music he listened to while writing his book.
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