When election is conducted, it’s usually majority that wins, that is the candidate with the highest number of votes.
For instance, If 50 million people voted and a candidate gets 27 million votes while the other gets 23 million votes, it’s safe to say the one with 27 million votes is the winner, but that’s not the same in USA.
Yes, there’s what’s called the electoral college. It’s just like assigning some numbers to each of the 50 states in America
The electoral college votes are 538 in total, and the winner needs just 270 to be declared winner.
Interestingly, some states, for instance, could have as high as 23, while others could have as low as 4.
Again, if, for example 50m votes are recorded and one candidate gets 30 million votes while the other gets 20 million votes, the one with 20 million votes could still be declared winner if the candidate wins in most of the states with higher electoral college votes.
Surprised?
It happened in 2016.
Hillary Clinton won by majority, but Donald Trump was declared winner because of higher electoral votes.
Why this happens mostly is if there’s a slim margin in a state, for instance, if candidate “”A”” gets 3 million votes, while candidate “”B”” gets 2 million votes, and the electoral college votes for that particular state is just 4.
Now, if candidate “”B”” wins like 2 states with a tight margin of 1 million votes or so, and these two states have electoral college votes of 20 and 30 respectively, then candiate “”A”” wins 4 states with low electoral college votes each, you’ll see that the 2 states won by candidate “”B”” gives a combined 50 electoral votes, while combining the 4 states won by candidate “”A”” gives less, just 16 electoral votes!
As you can see, in 2016, Hillary Clinton got the majority votes (65 million), while Donald Trump got 62 million votes. But Trump was declared winner because he had the highest electoral college votes, 304, compared to Clinton that got 227.
So it’s not actually the total number of votes that matters, but the total number of states with the highest electoral votes!
