Before the last US Presidential election, in 2020, we asked whether it was possible for Donald Trump to again lose the popular vote but win the Presidency, as he had done in 2016. Although this did not happen, with Joe Biden winning the popular vote and the Presidency, after the election we explored how close a ‘wrong winner’ election had been to happening again.

The answer was… pretty close, actually. In 2020, Biden’s margin of victory over Trump in the nationwide popular vote was 4.4% (51.3% vs 46.9%). However, his margin of victory in the ‘tipping point state’, Wisconsin, the state that put Biden across the line in the Electoral College vote, which decides who wins the Presidency, was a much narrower 0.6% (49.4% vs 48.8%). Biden also won Arizona and Georgia by even more wafer-thin margins of 0.4% and 0.3%.

The Electoral College system clearly continued to skew in Trump’s favour

In 2016, Trump got 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton but became President. In 2020, Trump got 7 million fewer votes than Joe Biden but lost the crucial ‘tipping point state’ of Wisconsin by just 20,000 votes. Biden did manage to increase his Electoral College victory by winning a further two states by even narrower margins, Arizona by 0.3% (49.4% vs 49.1%) and Georgia by 0.2% (49.5% vs 49.3%).

However, these results make it clear that under the current system, it is perfectly plausible that a US Presidential candidate could receive over half the votes cast, yet still not win the election.

Given that nationwide polls and those in key swing states show a very close race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, it is sensible to ask a similar question to that which we posed four years ago…

Could Trump lose the popular vote for the third time but secure a second term as President?

The reason that this might be possible is the First Past the Post style Electoral College, the system that is used to elect the President of the United States.

In almost all countries that elect an executive president, the people vote for the president directly, often with some sort of mechanism to stop candidates winning on low shares of the vote. For example, in France, people vote for a candidate and, if none win a majority, the top two go through to a second round. The one with the most votes across the country, usually in this second-round run-off between the top two candidates from the first round, wins.

In the US, this is not the case. Under the Electoral College system, each state (plus the District of Columbia) is allocated a number of Electoral College votes, roughly in proportion to their population, but weighed towards the smaller states. The number of Electoral College votes varies from 54 for California to three each for Alaska, Delaware, District of Columbia, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming. Wyoming has one electoral college vote for every 195,000 people, while Texas, Florida and California have one per roughly 700,000. A candidate needs 270 Electoral College votes to win the Presidency.

Amazingly, the fact that each voter isn’t equal isn’t even the root of the problem.

The vast majority of states apply a winner-takes-all system, whereby the candidate who wins the most votes in a state are assigned all of that state’s Electoral College votes. The exceptions are Maine, which assigns two of its four Electoral College votes to the winning candidate in each of its congressional districts and Nebraska, which assigns three of its five Electoral College votes to the winning candidate in each of its congressional districts.

This first past the post style system means it doesn’t matter whether a candidate wins 51-49 or 80-20, in nearly every state they will win every Electoral College vote that state has.

Like First Past the Post, the Electoral College can crown the wrong winner

A closer look at three states, in the Great Lakes region of the US, which were crucial in both the 2016 and 2020 election and are likely to be crucial again in 2024, indicate how the Electoral College can produce ‘wrong winner’ outcomes.

These three states are Pennsylvania (19 Electoral College votes), Michigan (15 Electoral College votes) and Wisconsin (10 Electoral College votes). Prior to Trump’s 2016 victory these states had voted for the Democratic candidate in every Presidential election since 1992 (Michigan and Pennsylvania) or 1988 (Wisconsin). In 2016, Trump was able to outperform his nationwide popular vote performance in these three states and flip them in his favour, winning each of them by wafer-thin margins of less than one percentage point. If Clinton had managed to keep these states in her column, she would have become President. However, she lost them, which meant the fact she received 3 million more votes than Trump across the United States as a whole, counted for nothing.

In 2020, Biden was able to win each of these seats back from Trump, thereby regaining the White House for the Democrats. However, in each of these states, Biden’s victory margin was narrower than his overall victory margin over Trump (4.4%) – Wisconsin (0.6%); Pennsylvania (1.2%); Michigan (2.8%).

So much rests on a handful of swing states, such as these three, which mean big changes in support in other parts of the country can count for nothing. For example, in California, Joe Biden’s majority over Trump was 5.1 million votes, a large increase on Clinton’s majority over Trump, which was 4.3 million votes. However, this big swing counted for nothing as it occurred in a ‘safe’ Democratic state, where the Electoral College votes were already tied up for Biden and it was impossible to gain any extra Electoral College voters from this increase in support.

This has strong echoes of the First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) electoral system, that is used for UK general elections. It’s clear why in both FPTP and the Electoral College the vast majority of campaigning is targeted in swing states or seats, with vast swathes of both the UK and US, which are regarded as ‘safe’ for one party or another, ignored.

In a democracy, the location of your voters shouldn’t be more important than their number. Sadly, under systems like the Electoral College, the democratic will of the people, clearly expressed, can be overruled by the arbitrary geographic rules of ‘winner’ takes all.

The National Popular Vote Compact

The National Popular Vote Compact is a movement for electoral reform in the US. Seventeen states, plus the District of Columbia have enacted the Compact into law, the most recent being Maine in April 2024. The law would see the Electoral College votes of these states go to the winner of the national popular vote. However, it needs states with a total of 270 Electoral College votes, enough to win the Presidency and it is still 61 Electoral College votes short of the target. All of the states that have signed up are reliably Democrat-voting states at the Presidential level.

At the moment there does not appear to be any appetite among the Republican Party to consider reform of the Electoral College system. However, a recent article posited a scenario that could change that – Trump winning the popular vote but losing the Electoral College. This seems unlikely, given that the Democrats have won the popular vote in five out of the last six presidential elections and Trump has not got more than 47% of votes in either of his previous two Presidential runs. However, it will probably take this or something similarly seismic, such as the Republicans losing Texas and its 40 Electoral College votes (which is a possibility at some point, given the state has been trending towards the Democrats in recent years), for Electoral College reform to become a truly bipartisan issue.

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Barring an act of God, 5 November 2024 will see a rematch of the 2020 US Presidential election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

Looking back at the nationwide result in 2020, you would be forgiven for thinking that Biden secured a relatively comfortable victory, winning 7 million more votes than Trump. Biden won over half the votes cast (51.3%), finishing 4.4 percentage points ahead of Trump (46.9%).

However, unlike almost all other Presidential elections throughout the world, the US President is not elected via the popular vote. If they were, then Donald Trump would never have taken office. In 2016, Hillary Clinton received around 3 million more votes than Trump (48.0% to 45.9%).

How did Trump become President without ever winning the popular vote? The answer is the Electoral College (EC).

The First Past the Post style Electoral College

Each state (and the District of Columbia) is allocated a number of EC votes, roughly in proportion to their population. The number of EC votes varies from 54 for California to three each for Alaska, Delaware, District of Columbia, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming. In order to become President, a candidate needs to reach 270 EC votes.

Almost every state applies a winner-takes-all approach to allocating their EC votes, which means, just like in First Past the Post, winning a state by a wide margin is of no extra benefit to a candidate than winning it by a narrow margin. Take the 2020 results from the two most populous states, California (55 Electoral College votes) and Texas (38 Electoral College votes). Biden won California by a margin of 5.1 million votes (63.5% to 34.3%), whereas Trump won Texas by a much smaller 631,000 votes (52.1% to 46.5%). However, no differentiation is made, the winner takes all of the EC votes in each state.

In 2020, Biden secured 306 EC votes to 232 EC votes for Trump (based on how the public voted on election day). Again, on paper, this looks like a fairly comfortable EC victory for Biden, but digging deeper into the state-by-state votes shows this was far from the case.

The three closest results were in states won by Biden by less than one percentage point – Wisconsin (Biden’s majority = 20,682); Georgia (12,670); and Arizona (10,457). In order for Trump to become President again in 2024, all he has to do is flip these three states, which in 2020 had a combined Biden majority of just 43,809 votes. A drop in the ocean compared to the 7 million majority Biden enjoyed nationwide.

Changes to the number of Electoral College votes each state has

Winning these three states would give Trump an extra 37 EC votes. Added to the 232 EC votes he won in 2020, this would put him on 269 EC votes, still one short of an outright victory. However, the number of votes each state has is partially based on their populations. Due to population changes in the 2020 US Census, the number of EC votes assigned to each state has changed. Victory in these three states, plus the states he won in 2020, would put Trump across the winning line on 272 EC votes.

First Past the Post means millions of votes don’t matter

The Electoral College shares similar drawbacks to our winner-takes-all First Past The Post (FPTP) system used at UK general elections. Both create ‘safe’ seats, where everyone knows who is going to win before a single vote has been cast, meaning voters in these places are taken for granted. Candidates can pile up votes in these ‘safe’ seats, for no extra benefit, for example, of the ten largest majorities at the 2019 UK general election, nine were in urban, Labour-held seats in London and Merseyside.

They can both cause ‘wrong winner’ elections, for example neither Al Gore or Hilary Clinton became President, despite getting more votes than their opponents (George W Bush and Trump) in 2000 and 2016 respectively. While in the UK, in 1951, Labour got more votes than the Conservatives but the Tories won more seats. In February 1974, the position was reversed, with the Conservatives winning more votes but Labour gaining a higher number of seats.

It looks increasingly likely that the next UK general election will be held in the autumn of 2024, around the same time as the US Presidential election. Within a matter of weeks we will witness national elections held under electoral systems that are prone to producing random and volatile results. With such important issues at stake in both countries, the details of electoral systems really do matter. Voters deserve to have their votes properly represented.

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Just before the 2020 US Presidential election, we asked the question ‘could Trump win the Presidency and lose the popular vote again’? Now that results from every state have been certified and the Electoral College has confirmed Joe Biden as the victor, we know the answer to that question is ‘no’. However, it was a close-run thing.

The first thing to note is the massive increase in turnout that took place. Over 158 million Americans voted, nearly 22 million more than voted in the previous Presidential election in 2016. This is good news for democracy. People clearly thought that the election mattered.

Hillary Clinton won 3 million more votes, Biden 7 million more

In 2016, Hillary Clinton received nearly three million more votes than Donald Trump, yet lost the election due to the Electoral College system. Joe Biden more than doubled the margin of victory over Trump, to just over seven million votes, yet his victory in the all-important Electoral College was still far from comfortable.

Biden’s margin of victory over Trump in the nationwide popular vote was 4.4% (51.3% vs 46.9%). However, his margin of victory in the ‘tipping point state’, Wisconsin, the state that put Biden across the line in the Electoral College race, was a much narrower 0.6% (49.4% vs 48.8%). Biden did manage to increase his Electoral College victory by winning a further two states by narrower margins, Arizona by 0.3% (49.4% vs 49.1%) and Georgia by 0.2% (49.5% vs 49.3%).

However, these results make it clear that under the current system, it is perfectly plausible that a US Presidential candidate could receive over half the votes cast, yet still not win the election.

The Electoral College is biased towards the Republican Party

At present, the Electoral College system gives the Republican Party an in-built advantage. Twice this century, a Republican candidate has become President despite losing the popular vote, George Bush Junior in 2000 and Trump in 2016. Trump’s 2020 national vote share is lower than that achieved by all of the Democratic Party candidates in all six Presidential elections held this century, including the three candidates that did not become President – Al Gore (48.4%); John Kerry (48.3%); Hilary Clinton (48.2%), yet Trump still came close to re-election.

One of the reasons the Electoral College stayed as tight as it did, was the differential vote swings in different types of states. This shows that where votes change is often as important as how many votes change under this system, just like the First Past The Post (FPTP) system used for Westminster elections.

On average, Biden achieved bigger swings in states that Clinton won in 2016.

There were 20 states, plus the District of Columbia, which Clinton won in 2016 and that Biden was widely expected to hold, which he did. If you take the Democrat vs Republican vote share margin change from 2016 to 2020, in each of these states and produce an average, Biden improved the Democrat vs Republican margin by 4.0 points per state, on average. Biden’s best swing among these states was in Vermont, which saw a 9.0% improvement in the Democrats’ vote margin versus the Republicans. There were seven other ‘Clinton 2016’ states where Biden achieved bigger swings than in any of the 30 ‘marginal’ or ‘safe Trump’ states – Colorado (8.6% improvement in vote margin); Delaware (7.6%); New Hampshire (7.0%); Maryland (6.8%); Connecticut (6.4%); Massachusetts (6.3%); Maine (6.1%).

None of these big swings brought any extra Electoral College votes for Biden. This has echoes of the UK Labour Party piling up massive swings and majorities in big cities, which bring no extra MPs.

Biden improved the vote margin by only half this amount, 2.0 points per state on average, in the 10 states that Trump won in 2016 but where it was widely considered that Biden had a reasonable chance of victory and where he needed to make inroads in order to win the Electoral College (Pennsylvania; Michigan; Wisconsin; Arizona; Georgia; North Carolina; Florida; Texas; Ohio; Iowa). Biden’s best swing among these states was in Georgia (5.4% improvement in vote margin).

In the 20 states that Trump won in 2016 and that were considered safe for him this time, Biden improved the margin by 2.7 points per state, on average. Biden’s best swing was in Kansas (5.9% improvement in vote margin).

Introducing the National Popular Vote Compact

Just like FPTP in the UK, the Electoral College system appears ripe for reform to something that is fairer and better reflects voter choice. The National Popular Vote Compact is a movement for electoral reform in the US. Fifteen states, plus the District of Columbia have signed up to the Compact, which would see the Electoral College votes of these states go to the winner of the national popular vote. However, it needs states with a total of 270 Electoral College votes, enough to win the Presidency, in order to come into effect. Despite the voters of Colorado backing the Compact last month, it is still 74 Electoral College votes short of the target. All of the states that have signed up are reliably Democrat-voting states at the Presidential level.

At the moment, there does not appear to be any appetite among the Republican Party to consider reform of the Electoral College system. Perhaps this will change if Texas, with its 38 Electoral College votes continues to trend towards the Democrats. In 2000, Bush Junior beat Al Gore by 21.3 percentage points, in Texas (59.3% to 38.0%). In 2020, Trump’s lead over Biden was 5.6 percentage points (52.1% to 46.5%). A once-reliably Republican state with so many Electoral College votes at stake, becoming marginal, might be a trigger for bringing reform a step closer.

In a democracy, the location of your voters shouldn’t be more important than their number. Sadly, under first past the post style systems like the Electoral College, the democratic will of the people, clearly expressed, can be overruled by the arbitrary geographic rules of ‘winner’ takes all.

America’s presidential election is the most famous presidential election in the world. The antiquated American system of choosing a president via an electoral college is also one of the worst methods for choosing a national leader. Since 1788, many other methods have been tried – so I’ve put some of them in order from what I think are worst, to best.

Worst. System. Ever – Electoral College

Americans don’t actually vote for the president, they are voting on what to tell a group of ‘electors’. Each state has a set number of electors based on their representation in the US Congress, the votes cast by Americans tell these electors who to vote for when the electoral college elects the president.

Like much of the US constitution, this bizarre system came out of the compromises needed at the time to create a nation out of 13 disparate colonies. Southern states, with massive enslaved populations, didn’t want to be dominated by northern voters. The numbers of electors each state has was also a compromise between the states. Each state gets one elector for each member of the House of Representatives they have, plus one for each senator. As every state has two Senators, irrespective of their population, voters in smaller states have more power to decide the president than voters in larger states.

We’ve ranked the electoral college as the worst way to elect a president as…

• While everyone has one vote they aren’t equal, votes cast in Wyoming carry 3.6 times more influence than those from California. A basic element of fair elections is one person one vote and every vote being of equal value.
• While voters in Wyoming have the equivalent of 3.6 votes each. Neither candidate has even visited the state. That’s because most states give all their electors to the winner of that state. Wyoming has voted republican since the 1960s, with large margins in recent years. The 20% of Wyomingite’s who voted for Hilary in 2016 saw their votes go nowhere. Millions of votes are wasted this way.
• Sometimes the loser goes on to win the election. All first past the post elections have a risk that the team that get the most votes don’t win the election, it happens in America, the UK and New Zealand (before they ditched the system in favour of MMP).

Less terrible. First Past the Post

There is a campaign in America to scrap the electoral college and give the presidency to the popular vote winner. But while that may seem a simple solution, the experience of countries that have a straight first past the post contest for president has been mixed. As we know when using first past the post to elect MPs in the UK, while the loser won’t win, the winner doesn’t need a majority of the vote to win either. In fact, the majority of voters may be opposed to the president.

In the Philippines, their, shall we say, controversial president, Rodrigo Duterte only won 39% of the vote in 2016. In May 1992 Fidel Ramos was elected to be president of the Philippines with only 24 per cent of the popular vote. We’ve ranked first past the post as the second-worst system as…

• Democracies should generally move in the direction the majority want. A minority of voters shouldn’t be able to steer the country off course.
• Election results under first past the post are often more to do with electoral politics than voters’ preferences. Rather than trying to win voters round, candidates can try to split opposition voters between multiple candidates.

Presidential elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cameroon, the Comoros Islands, Equatorial Guinea, Guyana, Honduras, Iceland, Kiribati, South Korea, Malawi, Mexico, Palestine, Panama, Paraguay, the Philippines, Rwanda, Singapore, Taiwan, Tunisia, Venezuela, and Zambia are all conducted via first past the post.

Getting Better. Two Round System

An easy way to stop candidates winning on less than half the vote is to have a second round of voting with just the top two candidates. France is the most famous country to use a two-round system. The first round of voting is similar to voting in the UK: electors vote for their preferred candidate.

If a candidate gets over half the votes, they are elected. If no candidate receives an overall majority, the second round of voting takes place two weeks later with the top two candidates from the first round.

Here’s why we only ranked the two-round system as the second-best method…

• The first round has all the vote-splitting problems of first past the post. In 2017, Macron and Marine Le Pen got though to the runoff, which Macron won easily. Le Pen only made it through because the centre right was split between multiple candidates. Ifop-Fiducial polled a hypothetical second round where Macron was up against Fillon (who was 1.3% points behind Le Pen). Macron still won, but only beat Fillon by 52% to 48%. It seems a more popular candidate was excluded, and an extremist let through.
• There is no guarantee that both candidates to go through will be from different sides of the political spectrum. In 2002 French voters had the choice between right-wing incumbent Jacques Chirac and the far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen. The slogan “Vote for the crook not the fascist” became popular on the left…

Two-round systems are widely used around the world. 

Simply the Best. Preferential Vote

The problems with having two separate elections can be fixed with some clever ballot paper designs and counting methods.

Rather than asking people to vote, then come back and vote for a reduced set of candidates, with a preferential vote, voters are asked to complete a ballot paper with numbers next to each candidate. The numbers explain who they would vote for first with a 1, then who they would vote for if their favourite candidate didn’t get though with a 2, who they would vote for if neither got through with a 3 and so on.

When they count the ballots, anyone who has 50% of the first votes wins. If nobody gets 50% the person who came last is excluded and the ballots are recounted in a ‘virtual’ second round. If your favourite candidate is still in the race, you still vote for them. If your favourite has been excluded your vote goes to your second choice. This process continues until one candidate gets half the vote.

We think this is the best way to elect a president as…

• You can’t split the vote. In 2011, seven people ran for president of Ireland – after four rounds of counting we know that, poet, politician and noted dog owner, Michael D Higgins was the candidate the majority of voters preferred. In 2018 he went on to win on the first round on a landslide.
• As extremist candidates are unlikely to get second choices, the system tends to work against candidates who are polarising and help those who are broadly liked.
• Candidates are also incentivised to run less divisive campaigns, as candidates will want to become their opponent’s voters second favourite candidate.

Badly designed electoral systems shape candidates, campaigns and countries. When extreme candidates can win on minorities of the vote under First Past the Post style systems, there is little incentive to appeal to a broader electorate. Instead, elections just become about snatching slim victories and playing the system. It’s not enough to just vote for better people, we need to stop the systems that let unpopular candidates win.

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In the last five US elections, two presidents have been summoned to office whilst obtaining fewer votes than their opponent.

For example, in 2000 George W. Bush won with four hundred thousand fewer votes than opponent Al Gore. More recently in 2016, Donald Trump became the 45^th president with three million fewer votes compared to his opponent Hilary Clinton.

This has occurred due to the Electoral College – a system that mirrors some of the worst effects of First Past the Post used to pick Westminster’s MPs.

What is the Electoral College?

The US’ Electoral College system means voters do not pick a President directly, but 538 ‘electors’ chosen from each state do. The system awards one hundred percent of a state’s electors to the candidate that gets the most votes in that state (except Maine and Nebraska which allocate them more proportionally).

This effectively means that every voter in that state who voted for somebody other than the ‘winner’ has their input erased when the electors cast their ballots to pick the President.

For example, in the 2016 Presidential Election, the battleground state of Michigan had a total of sixteen electoral votes.

The popular vote showed an even split, with Donald Trump securing 2.28 million votes and Hilary Clinton obtaining 2.27 million votes: a staggeringly close result.

Due to the ‘winner takes all’ aspect of the system, all of the sixteen electoral votes assigned to Michigan were assigned to Donald Trump, effectively disregarding all other votes.

The system requires the winner to obtain 270 of the 538 electoral votes to become president. But there’s no requirement to win the popular vote nationally.

Close to reform

There have been many historical instances where the system has come close to reform.

For example, James Maddison, also known as the father of the constitution, tried but failed to pass a constitutional amendment to ensure the winner of the popular vote won the Presidency. Though he helped to create the Electoral College, Maddison came to realise it was inconsistent with principles of democracy and ‘one person, one vote’.

The most recent and closest the system has come to reform was during the 1960s when the calls for abolishing the Electoral College and replacing it with a national popular vote began to gain traction. By 1968, around 80 percent of Americans were onboard, according to a recent New York Times feature.  This was not a partisan issue: both Republicans and Democrats wanted to see change.

However, Southern segregationists saw this as a race issue: they believed that the system was beneficial in preserving their voting dominance over black voters.

As the plurality of voters in these states tended to back segregation, segregationist politicians knew would keep full control of the state’s representation under the winner-takes-all system. If there was a popular vote for president, the segregationists knew that black people in their state would have an equal voice in choosing the President.

As a result, the amendment was talked out (filibustered) by three Southern segregationist senators: blocking any debate on the matter and stopping the reform from proceeding in 1970.

A new type of reform 

While there have often been calls for reform so that every voter is heard, amending the constitution would be very difficult.

However, there’s another way of reforming the process.

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is an agreement between states by which they would give all of their electors to the candidate with the most votes in all of the fifty states and D.C. combined. This would mean the candidate who wins the popular vote would become the President.

However, this would only start working when the states that have joined represent a majority of the electoral votes. Currently, the states that have joined have 196 of the required 270 majority, all of which are Democratic-leaning states.

Three Republican-leaning states were on track to join the agreement however, after the 2016 election result, Republican calls for reform died down – making it a more partisan issue.

Nonetheless, voters of all parties lose out through the system.

Disproportionate levels of election spending and media attention is focused on ‘battleground states’, while the vast majority of voters get no presidential visits and their concerns go ignored. Instead, political debate is skewed around the swing states, such as in 2020 those in the upper mid-west. That’s one reason fracking – a key industry in places like Ohio – was such a big issue this election, rather than, say wildfires or climate change, some believe.

One thing is clear:  like in the UK, one-person-takes all results skew politics and leave a lot of voters – sometimes the majority – feeling unvalued and voiceless.

Akash Thiara is a Placement Student with the Electoral Reform Society from the University of Nottingham.

Find out more about FairVote USA’s campaign against first past the post