The U.S. has had two recent presidential elections in which the winner of the popular vote — Al Gore in 2000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016 — ultimately lost to the challenger for the seat.
That’s because the U.S. has an Electoral College — each state gets a number of votes (by representative electors) in the Electoral College that’s proportional to its population. And 48 of the 50 states (Maine and Nebraska are the exceptions) have been awarding those electoral votes on a winner-takes-all basis.
But New York Times journalist Jesse Wegman says it doesn’t have to be that way: “The way the Electoral College operates today is not carved in stone,” he says. “The winner-take-all rule is really just a state invention. There’s nothing keeping us from changing it to a different method.”